Every year in November and December, I begin to pray about one or two words that I want to focus on as my word for the year. This year my words are Abide and Trust.
I can’t tell you every word I have used throughout the years. Sometimes they have been prophetic. Sometimes I forget them by February. But the events leading up to and the words that I chose for 2022, 2024 & 2025 shaped me in ways that I could never have even dreamed of.
My word for 2022 was something like “rebirth” or “regrowth” or something like that. Basically, I felt like the Lord was telling me that there was going to be something new happening… I got fired in June. It came out of nowhere. I had no warning and no idea that there was anything wrong. My last day at the church was in July and our family moved to southern CA around the time I started my new role in September. So in three months my family was uprooted from everything and everyone we loved and transplanted to a new place with no one we knew.
My family’s journey through this time is a story for a different day. My journey was bumpy. First my confidence was shot. I didn’t struggle with my new job, but I struggled socially in my new workplace. Emotionally I was limping along. Not in a very healthy place at all. Physically, I gained a bunch of weight after being let go and I was as heavy as I had ever been by the time I started at the new church. On top of that, at my new Church’s Men’s Retreat, I played a game of football… that had always been my way of connection. I am an athlete… But I broke my leg playing football at the Men’s Retreat in November 2022.
This was the perfect picture of the year that I had just had. Limping emotionally. Limping physically. Broken.
2023 was a better year. It was a year of health. I lost weight and my leg made a full recovery. Beth started working at the church, and that helped me find my place. The Youth team made some changes and I was looking ahead to 2024 ready to run! The visual I had all 2023 that I was chest deep in mud and I was drudging through it. The further I got through the year (the mud), the faster I was able to go.
I began praying for my word in November, fully expecting the word to be Run. I wanted the word to be run. I was ready to go. Ready to prove myself. Ready to show people that I shouldn’t have been fired. In December the Lord gave me a word. Rest.
What? Rest? No. That is not what I want to do right now. But I felt very clearly the Lord speak to me that I knew how to run. I ran in Modesto for 7 years. I ran myself into the ground.
I knew how to run. But I didn’t know how to rest.
Alan Fadling is an author of the book “An Unhurried Life” and he had spoken on rest many times at the Youth Pastor Conferences I attended. He is an advocate for sabbath. I remember hearing him define sabbath as taking “a day to do nothing productive and only enjoy the life that God has given you.” So I committed to sabbath each week in 2024. I kept it most weeks.
2024 was my year of rest. Generation Echo was conceived in November 2024. Those two things are absolutely related.
Generation Echo would not exist if I did not trust God to slow down and sit with Him.
My word for 2025 was “run”. And I did. And it felt good.
This isn’t the space to share all that has happened in the last year, I have done that many times and in many locations.
So here I am today… I ran hard in 2025. I am a little over one year from my year of rest. I can’t help but wonder how I am doing at resting these days. I wonder how much I learned. I didn’t rest much last year. That’s to be expected… But it probably is exactly the time that I needed to rest the most.
Maybe rest is something that is ever evolving. Rest in my youth pastor days looked like one thing. Rest in my Gen Echo days may look like something entirely different. Maybe rest in my Gen Echo days circles back to my words this year. Abide and trust.
Maybe rest for me now means not to strive on my own power. To sit with Jesus every day. And to trust that He is going to do what He said He is going to do. Whatever that is.
What about you? What does rest look like in your life in the season you find yourself in today?
