A Beautiful Year
A Message from Shelley Regan, Director of Community Engagement
sregan@fccedmond.org 405.341.3544
Last week, I was sitting in a coffee shop during a planning session when a mom excitedly shared a Christmas gift that promised to revolutionize the way her family tracked their days. "It's called Skylight," she said, practically glowing as she pulled out her phone to show me the app and wall display that sync schedules and manage family life. It looked and sounded beautiful. And just like that, swept up in the familiar impulse to change that rolls around with each new year, I was convinced: That's what I need for a better year. A new system!
I went home and fell into my familiar research/decision-fatigue rabbit hole. A couple of hours later, my husband John walked by and asked, "Don't we already have at least three calendars we don't use consistently?" He wasn't wrong.
While it looked like I was searching for a better tool, what I was really longing for was a better way to live inside my time.
That longing sat at the heart of John's sermon last Sunday, which launched our latest worship series, A Beautiful Year, setting a spiritual framework for the year ahead. He named a truth many of us carry without saying out loud. We spend a lot of time asking what we are doing with our lives and where we are headed next. Those questions matter. But alongside them there are others we rarely slow down enough to ask: How do we notice time as it passes? How do we learn to cherish the days and seasons that shape our lives?
In a world that often feels heavy, the solution is usually to move faster or find better systems. New year, new planner, new resolve. But the problem may not be the calendar we use. It may be the way we think about time itself.
The author, cultural commentator, and theologian Diana Butler Bass reminds us that the way we tell time shapes the way we live. She suggests paying attention to the cycles of the Christian year. This calendar offers a way of living in time that is less about control and accomplishment and more about meaning and attention. Through its seasons, it tells the story of God's deep connection with the world, helping us hold both grief and joy and offering enough beauty, honesty, and hope to keep going when life feels hard.
It is an invitation to live differently in time, especially in moments like these. Rather than being driven by crisis cycles, outrage, or exhaustion, the Christian year moves through the rhythms of waiting, incarnation, suffering, renewal, and hope. These seasons do not deny the pain of the world. They teach us how to stay present to it without losing our souls.
As I look at this world that is both wonderful and wounded, I am thankful for the wisdom the cycles of the church year that have helped me live faithfully in so many seasons. As Bass says, these seasons return year after year not because nothing changes, but because we do.
So what time is it? Well, the church calls the season we are in right now Epiphany. It is a season of seeing and it invites us to notice where light breaks through ordinary days and to trust that what we pay attention to will shape how we live. Over the coming weeks we will draw from stories found in the gospel of Matthew to practice that kind of seeing together.
This year, we are not chasing a better system. We are learning a better rhythm. One that helps us live honestly, love generously, and stay awake to the light already among us. This is how a beautiful year begins.