As I sit here reflecting on 2025 and the wonderful things and the trials and errors that have occurred, I can’t help but give thanks and feel gratitude to you, my Lord, as I look forward to 2026.

This coffee that I’m drinking, I thank you for. As I look out the window, the sun is coming through, and I thank you for it. As I look around this prayer room, the family that I was born into, I thank you for.

There are so many things that I can thank you for, Lord, and sometimes I forget. I have been blessed in my life, Jesus, with you, walking with you, and following the light through the ups and darkest downs. You know all of them; yes, I’ve had losses, necessary losses I once read in a book, yet essential because they shaped me into the woman I am today.

Thank you, also St. Teresa, for your beautiful words, which I’ve come to cherish over the years. “Let nothing disturb you,” I read in one of your books, and that is what I will do in 2026.

In numerology, which some believe is a form of sacrilegious practice or something like that, 2026 equals 10 if you add the numbers together, which means completeness and divine order!

And I look forward to more life, more health, more love, more of everything with you, Lord. I plan to travel this year, Lord, to your land; to your holy land, Jerusalem, to Israel. I know Pimpis will come with me, and she will beat this dreaded disease. I know that, Lord, because you are a God who doesn’t lie. You were once a man who came briefly to teach us God’s word, yet your truths have prevailed over thousands of years.

Thank you for the cinnamon in this coffee, the coffee beans, the creamer, and the honey you ate and savored. So yes, 2025 is coming to a close, and I look forward to it. As St. Teresa reminds us:

How is it, O God,

That even when we are determined to love you, we do not rise immediately to the perfect love that is our goal?

It is because while we think we are surrendering all to God, we are in fact giving up only the profits of our endeavors, the extras, what is left over from our daily needs. We keep ownership of the land itself.

We resolve to become poor, and it is a great thing to do. But we take great care never to be in want, not just of what is necessary, but of what is superfluous.

We give up our search for honor.

But the moment our honor is in danger, we forget that we have given it to God. We would take back our gift, snatching it, as it were, to have surrendered our will. So there are so many things. 

In everything, we look for pleasant ways to serve God. And because we do not give up ourselves wholly and at once, so the treasure of God’s gift to us is not given at once.

Heavenly Father, even as we measure out our lives to you a bit at a time, we must be content to receive your gifts drop by drop, until we have surrendered our lives wholly to you.–Let Nothing Disturb You.

I invite you to BREATHE as you bring in 2026.

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