The Brew: The One Key Resolution for 2025
Welcome to 2025 and the year’s first serving of The Brew.
We “resolve” to make it a good one.
Resolution Wishes
The planet starts the year off with 8.09 billion people, up 71 million from last New Year’s Day. And of those 8.09 billion, the only ones who didn’t know Joe Biden was in severe mental decline were those working in America’s legacy news media. May the media resolve in 2025 to cut out the gaslighting.
They might as well. The American people are fully onto them.
It only seems that 8.09 billion people illegally crossed our border under the Biden-Harris administration. May those here illegally resolve to return home of their own accord and properly apply to come through the front door if they wish to live here.
May we resolve to find every last one of the 300,000 unaccompanied children smuggled into our country and now thought to be “lost” by the Department of Homeland Security. If there is no accounting for them, believe me, we will be held to account by a Higher Authority.
According to Open Doors, more than 365 million Christians around the world face “high level of persecution and discrimination.” While Christians in the U.S. are likely to see much less grief under the incoming administration, the same cannot be said of places like Syria, where Christians face genocide after the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad. May we resolve to pray and fight for our brothers and sisters. May God protect them and bring His light to the earth’s darkest places.
How to Keep Your Personal Resolutions
The Associated Press has come out with a list of five tips for keeping your New Year’s resolutions. Here they are, with my commentary:
- Start Small. Don’t resolve to run a marathon; it’s better to resolve to run the dishwasher.
- Think Positive. Celebrate the small steps on the way while keeping your eye on the benefits of the goal. For example, I resolve to write another book in 2025. Meanwhile, I celebrate the fact that my mom made me learn how to type.
- Focus on Goals. The AP reports a 2020 study showed people did better with resolutions that focused on a specific goal, rather than trying to kick bad habits. So rather than resolving to give up soda, I should resolve to decrease my recycling of soda bottles. Last year, I resolved to become a scratch golfer. Sure enough, when I hit the ball now I scratch my head and wonder, “How did my ball end up way, way, way over there?”
- Enlist Friends and Your Calendar. That goes out the window if your resolution is to make friends.
- Be Kind to Yourself. According to Tamara Russell of the British Psychological Society, “Research shows that the more we develop self-compassion, the more compassionate we can become towards others.” I try being kind to myself, but then I become suspicious of my motivation.
The One Key Resolution
PureFlix has come out with a list of Christian New Year’s Resolutions or “Faith-Focused Goals for 2025.” You can guess most of the items on it — things like “memorize Scripture,” “find a Bible reading plan,” and “start a gratitude journal.”
But it seems the one topping the list is the most crucial — and one that is soooo easy to forget when thinking about resolutions: “gain God’s vision.” As our old office manager would say practically every day, “Have you gone vertical?” In other words, have you asked God what He wants you to do in 2025? What He wants changed and rearranged in your life? What of 2024 does He want left in 2024? Does He want you wading into deeper waters or shaking the dust off your feet? Or both?
If 2024 was a year of chaos and surprise, hairpin turns and heartbreak, 2025 promises to be year of tremendous change and movement. And He must be our guide. Not fear, not flesh, nor what appears at first blush to be logical and practical. We must trust in God, even as we address Him as Alan Rickman did Emma Thompson in Sense and Sensibility: “Give me a task, Miss Dashwood, or I shall go mad.”
Let our loudest resolution be four words: “Thy will be done.”
Oh, and in a softer voice: “Stop eating crappy stuff.”
Along the Stream…
Peter Wolfgang tells us why “Jimmy Carter Was the Worst President of My Lifetime, Until He Wasn’t.”
Meanwhile, Melissa Richeson discusses resolutions even more in “An Unresolved New Year.”
Al Perrotta is The Stream’s Washington bureau chief, coauthor with John Zmirak of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration, and coauthor of the counterterrorism memoir Hostile Intent: Protecting Yourself Against Terrorism.