Here’s to a new year, stretched out before us like an open landscape, the topography untouched, like a new journal waiting to be filled. This is just one exhilarating aspect for me about cross-country skiing:  setting out across a wide-open vista where you can almost see the stillness lay across a snowy landscape.

I remind myself daily that I am a work in progress and God loves me just as I am. He loves me because he is love and not because of anything I have done.

In a season where I moved from inner cities into the mountains of Kentucky, this song resonated in so many ways with me. It’s a song about no one being left out from the Gospel of Jesus Christ. As the hymn goes, even the shepherds were made aware of the moment Jesus was born. Imagine being in the middle of nowhere and angels appearing in the sky alerting you to the birth of a Savior.

The Bible mentions slowing down by talking about a spiritual discipline involving intentional stillness, rest, and a shift from self-reliance to a trusting dependence on God’s timing and strength. Slowing down is hard for everyone.

When you look in the mirror, He says you are “wonderfully made”. God created ALL of us and every feature and element of our DNA. He is the sculptor of the mountains. God created the perfect symphony with nature. The most beautiful landscape with a sunrise and sunset. Why shouldn’t we, His followers, create beautiful things as well?

The fact remains that I am scared. Certain things in life, when confronted with them, scare me. Like facing my parents’ mortality. It’s like a premature grieving; after all, it is in part what necessitates their move. And yet repeatedly, we are admonished to “fear not, neither be faint-hearted” (Isaiah 7:4).

One of the women pictured in his church was “Grand Duchess Elizabeth”. She lived in the early 1900s and was Protestant. Saint Elizabeth converted to Orthodoxy and was married to the governor of Moscow. Her husband was killed by an assassin in 1905. This gracious woman visited her husband’s assassin in prison and asked him to repent.

Ultimately, we all find ourselves in changing seasons as we navigate life’s trials. May we find in this fall season time to clear the refuse from summer’s harvest, the deadened stalks and dried-up grasses.

Before you consider serving others, consider how you are available. I get very frustrated when I see churches who have overwhelming needs in their community running all over the globe - while children are in foster care in their community, trafficking is rampant on nearby streets, and there’s homeless right in front of their very own buildings.

We grow so accustomed to the daily grind of our busy lives, with barely a thought of reassessing if what we are doing is what we ought to be doing. And here’s another thought:  what if the “thing you had planned” that didn’t turn out the way you thought, was actually part of the Bigger Plan?

The Panama sun beats down on the cracked ground, even in the mid-morning. I have never been out of the country in my nineteen years of life, but here I find myself in the suburbs of Panama City, serving with global missionaries and other students from my college.