I love to remind people that it is Abbas joy, not just His duty, to be present with us. Abba is delighted when we come to him, confide in him, bare our souls to him, press into him, and grow more to be more like him.

In one of my biggest lessons from two beautiful years of marriage, I wrote about how marriage requires being dutiful, but duty alone cannot sustain a thriving marriage. If I only ever felt it was my duty to love and care for Nelson, he’ll be shortchanged of the extent and intensity of love that was possible. Beyond duty is something I like to call fire. A love that literally burns for the other. Its a far greater level than duty, and It’s how I sense God desires and yearns for us. A very fiery love.

While God created us and is expected to watch over His creation like a father cares for his child (ideally), it is not mere duty that commits Him to us and I hope it’s a consciousness you carry in 2025. Gods commitment to you transcends duty, into deeper levels of fiery love.

And just because of this understanding, we must trust God to be good in all circumstance. When He breaks open the prison door at midnight like He did with Paul and Silas, and also when He sits with us in the prison cell through years of writing like He did with Paul. We judge Him faithful in both situations. I know we scream and desire the former, but the latter is also an evidence of a good God.

This year, i’m submitting and allowing my heart to be re-trained to not expect only what is humanly good, but what divinity terms good, I want to close my eyes to what I’ve known to be good by my feeling, and re-learn what is good from Gods perspective. I’m convinced it’ll help me judge more accurately. And as I’ll start to learn last year, with divinity, good always means eternal. Something the human mind will struggle to grasp.

So let’s commit to sitting in Gods fiery love for us, and showing Him same fiery love, which means loving Him not only when it’s convenient, and that means that through the miracles, or not, of this year, we will judge Him faithful.

A joy to continue this journey with you on this side! Let’s tarry and press in with our Good God in 2025.

Happy New Year!