As I’ve started 2025, I’ve been thinking a lot about how important it is to lean into and celebrate the things that bring us joy, encouragement, and nourishment of soul and body. And so I thought I’d do a quick wrap up of the things that are lighting me up and lighting the way for me this week. I’d love for this to be a regular thing in this space, but as with so many things, what feels exciting and doable on January 1 rarely lasts! So we’ll have to see. But at the very least, here’s what comes to mind for this week:
My year-end reflections and year-beginning planning always gets my synapses firing in all sorts of good ways. The theme that emerged from that process this week was simple abundance — the idea that abundance is more to do with appreciating the simple things in life than in accumulating things or money or ‘success’. It reminds me of that saying commonly attributed to Gandhi about how there is more than enough in the world for everyone’s need, but not everyone’s greed.
As I was thinking through the sorry state of the world as we enter 2025, I couldn’t help but think of the line from John 1, “The Light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it.” I was delighted when I found that this passage is from Sunday’s Gospel reading (this shouldn’t have been a surprise as it’s a standard text for Christmas 2 — but it was still a lovely serendipity and synchronism, even if it was an inevitable one!).
While I’m creative in the sense that I enjoy writing, photography, and drawing, illustrating, and painting, I’m not creative in the sense of coming up with innovative solutions and new ideas. I’m not the ideas guy, I’m the guy who will tell you fifteen ways your idea is probably going to fail. (I try to rein that in and make it more about finding ways to mitigate those risks, but I digress…). But I have a big sense as I enter 2025 of wanting to focus on making something new; the urge towards a creative spark is strong right now — we’ll see if it ignites.
My reading in 2025 has gotten off to a great start; I’m in the middle of two novels that I’m really loving: John Scalzi’s Lock In (2014), about the aftermath of a flu pandemic (it’s fascinating to me how many pandemic novels there were in the 2010s — was there something in the ether that novelists picked up on (a la Elizabeth Gilbert’s woo-woo Big Magic idea), or is this just hindsight bias?), and The Magnificent Ruins by Nayantara Roy (2024), about an editor in New York who has to return to her ancestral home in Kolkata when she inherits her family estate.
My music listening has been dominated mostly by my best of 2024 playlist. I’m still super impressed by the new album from ROSÉ, rosie, though, so that’s been getting a bit more play than the rest.
What’s lighting you up this week?
Matthew Root 
Becoming more set-apart.
Do not love the world or anything in the world.
Beginning to understand this more and more each and every day as He guides me. He is the Light.
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