Dear 2013,

Tell me:

What will you bring me this year?

Will you bring more disasters? More economic and political tensions? More hunger and thirst, not for righteousness, but for basic necessities?

Will you bring peace? New leaders, new followers, new systems? Will you bring new treaties and new wars? New massacres? Will you bring the end of some massacres? Will this be the year you finally deliver up Joseph Kony? Or will this be the year you introduce locals or the world to another one like him?

Will you bring me new hope, new relationships, new ventures? Will you bring the end of things I love? Will you bring the end to things I withstand? Will you end or prolong the waiting? Will you bring new opportunities? Will you bring growth? Will you bring heartache? Will this be the year that you shatter my world in a moment (again), or will you bring me to life? Will you bring new spaces, new faces? Or will you bring me back to people and places I have missed? Will you bring new births? Will you bring new families?

Will you bring the best of times or the worst of times?

And more importantly, will you be bringing more, or taking more away this year?

What will you bring me?

I’ll tell you what I will bring to you.

I will bring all of me for 12 months, no less and no more. I will be present.

I will bring you love – whom I will love I do not entirely know, but I will bring love to the table this year. Loving my neighbors, my friends, my family, the man on the curb and the woman on the street. The child in the store who won’t stop crying, or the mother who lives downstairs. I will bring love.

I will bring you joy – I will not only find joy in things, but I will create it, breathing life into it. This year, I will find, live, and give Joy.

I will bring hard work.  I will work hard for important things.

I will bring risk-seizing decisions and actions. I will not back down because of fear. I will leap and stride into new and intimidating things.

I will bring discomfort. I promise to inflict all those whom I can with a righteous indignation for the ways things are and the fact that they were not meant to be this way. I will not let it rest. I will not slip silently into the schemes of comfort. I will bring as much justice and awareness as I can.

I will bring friendship. I don’t know if you will also bring it, but I will be a friend to people… Some who are easy to befriend and others who are not.

I will bring imagination. I will invent and create and imagine the ways things could be.

And on that note, I will bring action. I will not be idle. Imagination, love, faith, good intentions, these are nothing without action. So I will act.

I will bring failure, to be sure. I hope to be attempting things that are too big for me at which I will fail. I hope to be trying enough that failure is inevitable sometimes.

I will bring adventure. No matter how they start or end, I will seek them out, invent them,  and invite others along on the journey.

I will bring kindness. In reality I will bring selfishness, but I will try to keep it at bay. I will bring laughter. I will bring arguments (as I hate that I do), but I will also bring resolution. I will bring commitment. I will bring authenticity. I will bring an open heart that is willing to be changed and filled. I will bring not nearly enough, but it will be all that I can give.

And I will bring faith – faith that no matter what you bring, that I will either live on, or I won’t, but that either way, somehow, God is still good.

There it is. I don’t know whether you’ll be a partner or an adversary in my life’s story.  I hope you will be kind to me in what your bring. But even if you’re not, I’ll try to bring my best, all the same.

Sincerely,

Jo from 2012