Can Anything Good Happen This Year?

A year ago today, I felt God make what seemed like an absurd promise to me: that this would be a good year.

I say absurd because it had been so long—so many years—since I had received any good news, let alone lived through a genuinely good year. The idea that anything could change felt foolish, even though I was desperate for it to be true. Hope felt risky. Expectation, naïve.

Six years ago, everything changed.

It was New Year’s Eve, 2019. We were tucked into a booth as a family at one of our favorite restaurants in New York City—Copellia’s, the lively Cuban diner that held some of our happiest memories. That night, it would also become the place of one of our most heartbreaking ones.

It had been our tradition to “cheers God” every New Year’s Eve—to look back together and celebrate all we had seen Him do that year. We had just finished rejoicing, clinking glasses in gratitude for His provision, His protection, His kindness. And this detail matters: after we had finished looking back at the blessings of the year, and before we could look ahead to the new year and all we hoped and dreamed God might do, I got up from the table to use the restroom.

Moments later, I returned to that same booth to find my husband grief-stricken, frozen in place, on the phone.

The look on his face is still etched into my mind. His father had passed away suddenly.

What followed was a blur of last-minute travel plans and funeral arrangements. But it was also the beginning of a season that would bring wave after wave of loss, hardship, and what felt like plague-like misfortune against our family. (I shared some about it here on this blog.)

And yet, as devastating as that moment was, I’ve come to realize it carried something even more insidious beneath the grief.

There was a lie buried there—one I wouldn’t recognize until years later—that needed uprooting:
the lie that we would never again be able to look to the future with expectancy.
That we would never dream again.
That our hope wasn’t just interrupted that night in the diner—but had permanently come to a halt.

I’ve come to believe that one of Satan’s sneakiest and cruelest lies is the lie of permanence.
The quiet voice that taunts you, sometimes subtly, sometimes relentlessly: Nothing will ever change. Not this year. Not ever.

That your heart will always be shattered.
That you will always be alone.
That you’ll never have what it takes.
That you (or someone you love) will always struggle, always fall short, always live on the edge of survival.
And that you’re foolish for even considering the possibility of something different.

I know this lie well—because I believed it myself.

And it didn’t help that the years that followed that night at the diner were exhausting. The last five, brutal beyond words. I went from a woman who had once felt favored and full of purpose, to one who felt forgotten and punished by God. We were no longer the family gathered in a booth at the diner brimming with celebrations for all God had done. Instead, year after year, we were sitting in the wreckage of what He hadn’t done—the prayers unanswered, the protection that didn’t come, the restoration we knew God was capable of but that felt painfully delayed.

We weren’t thriving. We were surviving. One step in front of the other.

So when the idea of a good year was placed in front of me, it felt impossible. Ludicrous, even.
Good? After all this?  How could anything good possibly come in the New Year?

Around that same time, I came across a man in Scripture who asked a very similar question.

In John 1, Philip tells Nathanael about Jesus—about the Messiah—who had come from a small, unimpressive town called Nazareth. Nathanael’s response is raw and honest:

“Nazareth!” exclaimed Nathanael. “Can anything good come from Nazareth?”
“Come and see for yourself,” Philip replied.
(John 1:46, NLT)

We aren’t told why Nathanael doubted that anything good could come from Nazareth. But I imagine he had his reasons—just like I had mine. Reasons shaped by experience, upending disappointment, and what history had taught him to expect in the future, because in the words of Dr. Phil, “The best predictor of the future is the past.” 

Can anything good come from Nazareth?
Can anything good really be ahead—for our family, for our tiny church plant in the biggest city, …for me?

If you feel similarly, I don’t know your reasons for struggling to look toward the future with expectation and I won’t pretend to—but I know this: they’re valid. I don’t know what moment interrupted your dreaming, or what season brought your hope to a halt altogether.

But here’s what I do know.

God is extending the same invitation now that He extended to me a year ago—and the same one Philip extended to Nathanael:

Come and see.

Dare to hope again. Push back against the lie that the best is behind you. Believe—not just that good is possible—but that God is already at work bringing it toward you this calendar year.

“You will be rewarded for this; Your hope will not be disappointed.”
(Proverbs 23:18)

And that invitation—come and see—is exactly what shaped this last year of my life.

Because there really was so much good God brought in 2025.

I am still very much not at the finish line. There are prayers I’m still praying, things I’m still believing for, and places in my life that remain tender and unfinished. But this past year, I watched God bring redemption into places I once believed were too broken and ugly to be restored.

He helped me heal the places where infertility and abandonment had ravaged my heart—and even my faith—leaving it feeling mangled beyond repair. Places I assumed would always ache or make me erupt with anger. Places I had quietly stopped believing God had the power to touch and transform, especially the things I still don’t understand. (And shoutout to the literal thousands of dollars of counseling that absolutely partnered with that healing.)

There has also been incredible fruit from the work we have been doing—and always have been doing—but this year, we finally got to see it. For so many years, we planted, labored, showed up, and poured out with little visible return. (Or worse, for so many years we planted, labored, showed up, and poured out only to feel utterly humiliated.) But this year, we watched good come from seeds sown long ago. We saw growth and impact where there had once been only faithfulness in the dark. And there were multiple surprising instances throughout the year where I found myself savoring a moment and verbalizing to God that I was grateful I didn’t quit because: 1. Looking back, there were so many reasons I should have. 2. I wouldn’t have gotten to experience this moment in the present if I had.

We witnessed God’s provision in ways that brought real stability and security—nothing flashy like years past, but deeply sustaining. One day I’ll tell the full stories: what it looks like to start a church in the most expensive city in America with $330; the tears, the sleepless nights, and the many times we went without insurance and zeroed out our bank account to fund what God asked us to build (which, unsurprisingly, often led to more tears and even less sleep). Again, we are still not at a finish line and are still very much in need of God to move in big ways—read: there are still a million miracles we need Him to do, and (I’ve heard) He’s the kind of God who’s capable of that—but my Enneagram 6 self is profoundly grateful for the steadiness He brought this last year.

The cost has been high these past eight years—financially, physically, spiritually, and emotionally. But this last year, it felt like God breathed on what we had been building for so long. And in doing so, He gave us the proof we needed: that He was with us, and that what we were doing mattered.

It always mattered.
Even when it didn’t feel like it.

So if you’re standing at the edge of a new year wondering if anything good could possibly be ahead—if your faith feels tired, your hope feels fragile, or your expectations feel foolish—I want you to know this:

God is still in the business of bringing good out of unlikely places. Out of brutally long seasons. Out of pain that feels permanent. Out of whatever Nazareths in our lives we’ve written off entirely. God can even do the miracle of teaching us how to dream again. 

He is inviting us in 2026: Come and see.

May this be the year you dare to hope again. May you push back against the lie that the best is behind you. And may you discover, in your own life, that your hope for what God can do will not be disappointed.

And may you look back a year from now, amazed, just like I am, realizing that God was faithful after all—that He did exactly what He promised, bringing unexpected and abundant good, even when believing for it felt almost impossible. 

(Almost.)