A Reflection on 2025
2025 was a good year, but also a very challenging one.
I finished graduate school, started a job in a new city, and began a relationship with an incredible woman. Things were going my way.
But things fell apart just as quickly. The job wasn’t what I thought it would be. Depression reared its ugly head. And before I knew it, the relationship I had such high hopes for fell apart, too. I was angry, hurt, and confused. Why had God allowed this to happen?
I wasn’t sure, but even though I felt broken beyond all belief, I made one crucial choice amidst all the pain and frustration—I chose to trust God.
With the benefit of time (and lots of prayer and wise counsel), I have begun to see God’s design more clearly. I know now that God used this experience to break my dependence on outcomes and reveal certain idols I had erected in my heart. I have been able to look back on what happened, though painful, with gratitude, trusting that God is working all things for His glory and my good.
That being said—I want to make two observations:
Your pain has a purpose
“Not only so, but we also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. And hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us.”1
God uses trials to shape and refine us. He may use such experiences to increase our faith or reveal our weaknesses, often both. While this is never an easy process, it is essential to our sanctification. Remember when the seraphim pressed the hot coal to Isaiah’s unclean lips? That couldn’t have been very enjoyable. But what does the angel say? “See, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away and your sin atoned for.”2 God uses trials in a similar way. Like a forest fire that clears away dead tree matter and undergrowth, replenishing the soil, God uses trials of various kinds to reveal and burn off those parts of us that have stood in the way of spiritual growth—of complete surrender to Him. Trust that God knows what He’s doing, and then get out of the way. “Then Jesus said to his disciples, ‘Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.’”3 This is the meaning of the Christian faith.
God can bring new life from the graves of ourselves.
“There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit.”4
The Apostle Paul boasted of his weakness (i.e., his “thorn in the flesh”) because it testified all the more to Christ’s redeeming power. Perfect people don’t need a savior, but no one can live up to the righteous requirements of the law. The evangelical mystic, Oswald Chambers, once wrote that “If sympathy is all that human beings need, then the cross of Christ is a farce, there was no need for it.”5 The Pharisees and Sadducees certainly made much of their outward devotion to the law, but they remained unregenerate slaves to sin. Why? Because mere religiosity apart from the power of the cross and the Holy Spirit still sends us to hell. So acknowledge your shortcomings, and praise God that His “strength is perfected in [our] weakness.” I get it: growth can be lonely. The reason healing hurts more than heartbreak is that healing forces us to confront the ugly parts of ourselves—those parts we would rather keep hidden. The selfishness, the lack of charity and respect, the failure to love as Christ loves. I know how that feels. And if I could turn back time and do things differently, I would. But life doesn’t work that way. Christ didn’t die so we could live in the past. So walk forward in forgiveness, your record wiped clean, trusting that the God who rescued you at infinite price is “able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think, according to the power at work within us”.6
Romans 5:3-5 NIV
Isaiah 6:7 NIV
Matthew 16:24 NIV
Romans 8:1 KJV
My Utmost for His Highest, p. 355.
Ephesians 3:20 ESV