New year, same old sanctified you

I recently had the privilege of watching the praise team from my small, Baptist church do their annual rendition of Andrew Peterson’s Behold the Lamb Christmas concert. I have spent a decade watching them give this concert, and it is a highlight of my year. One of my best friends plays guitar and sings. One of my other dear friends plays the piano. The bass player for years, a faithful old Christian man and a colleague at my university, died a couple of years ago. He was replaced by a faithful, young Christian man. There’s like a five-second bass solo in one of the songs, and I guarantee you two-thirds of the congregation’s eyes were misting up while thinking of the old guy we miss, who is now in heaven. This is so cool.

It is a highlight of my yearly calendar to watch my friends do a thing that God has gifted them beautifully to do, that He has not in any way gifted me to do.

As I was watching, it occurred to me—and not in a bad way—how much older everyone (myself included) has gotten. Some of their kids, who were little when we arrived 10 years ago, are now serving alongside them on the praise team. These are people who, by and large, are doing the same jobs they had a decade ago and are enjoying life in the same church in which they were enjoying it a decade ago.

By many metrics, this has been my most boring decade but also my happiest. I’ve been in the same job—which I love—the whole time. I’ve done fewer “impressive” things in the past decade than I have in any previous. I quit a very successful podcast in favor of two less successful, more enjoyable ones. I’ve published fewer books—almost to the degree that I’m rarely asked “What are you working on?” anymore. It has been great. My youngest son was baptized, and my oldest son has become a dear adult friend and my weekly workout partner.

Concurrent with this realization is the annual cultural reminder, and pressure, to do something great. Flipping on YouTube last night for highlights of Tyson Fury vs. Oleksandr Usyk 2, I first had to sit through a long ad by a beefy guy around my age swinging a weighted bat of some kind on a beach for fitness. This is now an option. The year of our Lord 2025 will also be the year of the miracle weight loss injection starting at $285 per month if the ads during college football are to be believed. This, also, is now an option and requires only a phone call to get started. I, too, could look like an oddly deflated version of my current self for the cost of only a car payment (and the cost of the other drugs that will be needed to counteract the negative effects of the weight loss drug). This would also require me to give myself a shot on a regular basis, which may also cause me to pass out.

On social media, I’m reminded that I should be reminding everyone of all of the books I’ve supposedly read this year, which would definitely need to include an impressive volume on theology, something on racial reconciliation (I am, after all, a good guy, right?), a biography of Winston Churchill (because if I wasn’t a (fill in the blank), I’d probably be running a country), something on where God is in these tumultuous times, and definitely something on leadership because we are all for sure leaders, right? I should, at the bare minimum, be discovering my “why?”

I’m reminded that I should spend more time thinking about my investments because retirement is now no longer conceptual, and I could make some big money owning additional properties, just like literally everyone I know whose name isn’t Ted Kluck. Except I have no interest in owning or managing properties because I’m barely managing the one I sleep in every night.

Despite being last chair saxophonist when it wasn’t football season at Blackford High School, I could learn an instrument and strive to be in the praise band myself. I should probably also be learning another language via an easy-to-use app on my phone.

And so forth.

Or I could just keep doing what I’m doing, which is trying to glorify God and enjoy Him forever. This is the same God who I am told to behold, which is a tall order if I’m spending most of my time beholding all of those other things and most of all beholding myself. This is the same God who reveals Himself through His word, which I’ll try again to read all the way through next year and which I sometimes succeed at. This time, I know, it will not return void.

In another decade, Lord-willing, I hope I’m still watching Behold the Lamb every December right here. I hope I’m still teaching. I will be an older, weaker version of myself who will probably have failed to get rich and will for sure have failed to reverse the effects of aging. I may or may not be a leader of anything.

But I’ll slip my arm around my wife—also a decade older—in a dark sanctuary, I’ll brush away her somehow always great-smelling hair and whisper in her ear that I thank God for all He has given me.