My Word for 2024 & A Life Update

Hello friends! It's been awhile. My last group of blogs was a series about how faithful God has been during my transition back into the U.S. of A. from overseas, but I kind of left you all hanging, didn't I? Although it's not the norm for my blog, I think it's fitting to do a brief life update before we get into the meat of this post:

We are adjusting nicely now and are still discovering God's mercies during this season. The feeling of being misplaced, as mentioned in a prior blog, is eradicated now that we are finding community and plugging in at our church here.

We officially have all of our things after a crazy adventure of trying to get our hands on our storage items and, for the most part, are completely moved in. This once foreign place with the steep mountains and the tall evergreens is definitely starting to feel like home. Truly God hasn't, nor will He ever, let us down.

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Now, transitioning in the topic I want to touch on in this post - I have received my word for 2024! For those of you who don't know what I mean by 'my word for 2024' here's a little context and backstory:

For the past few years, at the beginning of the year, I have been praying and asking God for a word. You could call this word a landmark, something that I can keep coming back to to reflect on throughout the year. My first ever word was in 2021 - surrender. Funny enough, I ended up surrendering a lot to Christ that year. My second word, for 2022, was rebirth. That one was confusing, as I had already been a Christian for years and therefore had been born again, but then, I gleamed exactly what He meant by it. One of the definitions for rebirth is this:

{Rebirth: a period of new life, growth, or activity; a revival}

Call it a coincidence, but my faith ended up skyrocketing that year. The new growth was undeniable. Then, my word for last year was acceptance, which revealed itself in the way you'd expect, the letting go of things I couldn't change, but even more so in this definition of the word:

{Acceptance: the actions of consenting to receive or undertake something being offered}

Acceptance was an invitation to receive goodness from God, to EXPECT it even, instead of jumping to 'worse case scenarios' like I had been prone to do. It was God reshaping my brain to instantly trust Him. Needless to say, my 'word of the year' has always summed up the year beautifully and in ways that I could never imagine or guess beforehand.

Now onto my new word for this new year - understanding. I actually got this word early this time, before Christmas even! Usually they are revealed to me after the first of the year, and after much prayer, but this one just came out of nowhere.

I want to stop for a second and touch on something here: I never hear these words from God audibly. Instead, God intercedes my thoughts. This experience comes with a fullness, or a warmth, that seems to radiate straight from my heart. It is hard for me to explain, but not hard for me to notice. It overcomes me out of the blue and in a way that leaves me without a doubt that it's God, truly God, and not just my own thoughts.

Now let's embrace a tradition of mine - defining words I already know, specifically my new word. There are many definitions of this word online, but I want to just reflect on these few:

• {Understanding: the ability to understand something; comprehension}

This is the first thing that came to mind when this word first greeted me. I instantly became excited about this new word and began to look forward to all that it could mean, which is such a 360 compared to my first impressions to my previous words.

• {Understanding: sympathetically aware of other people's feelings; tolerant and forgiving}

I think all of us are always learning how to have grace and forgiveness. I feel in my spirit that God is going to reinforce this mindset of grace in me this year, all across the board. Not in just forgiving others, which I don't usually find difficult, but the real challenge for me, which is forgiving myself.

• {Understanding: having insight or good judgement}

I sense that another lesson for me this year is going to be discernment. Specifically, knowing what is right for me and what isn't from season to season. Usually, my first instinct is to jump in before measuring the depth of something, which sometimes leaves me in over my head. God is teaching me to seek Him before taking the plunge, even if that means taking a back seat.

Lately, even before this word 'understanding' popped up with promises of new knowledge, God has been urging me back to Psalm 46:10:

Be still, and know that I am God; I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth!

In this season, He is wanting me to be still and dive into knowing Him (I think He is also reinforcing that trust that He started on last year). Funny enough, this is exactly what I need after the hard adjustment and stress of the move. He is filling me up so that, when I do jump into whatever He has for me, I can dump it into someone else's cup.

So, that's it! My update and my new word for 2024! I can tell already that this year is full of promise and I can't wait to unravel it all with you as God reveals things to me one at a time. I am reminded of my analogy of the 'chewing gum' from a previous blog. To sum it up: He gives me little bits of "metaphorical gum" or knowledge at a time to "chew on" or dwell on. And until the next morsel emerges, you all know already that I am going to grasp some joy in the current "chewing" or gleaning.