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Across the Pastor’s Desk by Charles Teixeira

If you’re like me, I experience a bit of a disappointing lull every year in the wake of Christmas. All the presents have been opened, carols sung and jammies folded away for next year. And it’s in the quiet of this week after Christmas every year that the reality of the new year comes into view.

For some of us, the new year brings with it all the excitement of new beginnings: a wedding day that can’t come soon enough or a new member of the family you’re waiting to welcome.

For others of us, the new year is held up by our hopes for what may be: the hope of a new beginning in our careers or getting into the college of our dreams.

While the new year will bring all kinds of joys, it will also undoubtedly bring hardships with it.

Some of the rough waters ahead have already stirred up for many of us: sicknesses we’re hoping can be healed, depression that hasn’t lifted yet, loneliness that haunts us or grief that isn’t getting any easier.

For others of us, we’re not so much daunted by the realities that are ahead as much as the possibilities of what may be ahead — all the anxieties and what if’s that keep us awake at night of issues at home or across the world.

No matter what is ahead of us in 2025, what I do know is that we were never meant to face it alone.

That’s the audacious claim of Christmas; that God took on flesh and entered into all the trials of humanity alongside us. God could not remain God-far-off and so he became God-with-us: Immanuel.

Every adversity, no matter its nature, always tends to make us feel alone in our pain. But we’re not. God is there to comfort you and assure you that he will walk with you through whatever it is you’re facing.

I can’t tell you whether everything is going to be all right in 2025. What I can tell you is this: You don’t have to go through it alone. He’s there for you. Be bold enough to believe it.

Charles Teixeira is a pastor at First Presbyterian Church in Albert Lea.