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Hear the word of the Lord. Now his parents went to Jerusalem every year at the feast of the Passover. And when he was 12 years old, they went up according to custom. And when the feast was ended, as they were returning, the boy Jesus stayed behind in Jerusalem. His parents did not know it, but supposing him to be in the group, they went on a day's journey. But then they began to search for him among their relatives and acquaintances. When they did not find him,  they returned to Jerusalem looking for him.  After three days, they found him in the temple,  sitting among the teachers,  listening to them and asking them questions.  And all who heard him were amazed at his understanding and his answers.  When his parents saw him, they were astonished.  And his mother said to him, son,  why have you treated us so?  Behold, your father and I have been searching for you in great distress."  And he said to them,  Why were you looking for me?  Did you not know that I must be in my father's house?  And they did not understand the saying that he spoke to them.  And he went down with them  and came to Nazareth,  and he was submissive to them.  And his mother treasured up all these things in her heart.  and Jesus increased in wisdom  and in stature  and in favor with God  and man.  This is the word  of the Lord.  When  did that happen? Most of us have some kind of an experience with the idea of a growth chart, even if we never had one in our homes.  It could be old IDs, it could be journals, it could be uh graduation photos.  In the home that my wife grew up in,  I remember in the kitchen pantry there were marks going up the door frame with  names and dates on birthdays for my wife Amelia and her sisters.  And sometimes we look back, we can look at those things and realize, wow, I can't  Believe I was ever that short  particularly in my family and my wife's family who were all tall  Sometimes maybe for your family. There were very small gaps over periods of time  between those moments of growth  and sometimes we can look back at pictures we can look back at the growth charts and  and Realize I'm not the same person  that I was back then Growth  almost never feels dramatic  when it's happening, right?  You're in the middle of it and it's just ordinary life. It's only when you step back weeks or  months or years sometimes  that you can see something has been  quietly changing all along  and you get a sense of perspective of where you've been and where you are now.   As we begin a new year on the calendar,  that can matter for what we think about  discipleship, which is just a big fancy word that means shaping our lives to follow an example.  That's all it means to be a disciple. A disciple is a student. A disciple is a  follower.  And for Christians,  we are students. We are followers of Jesus. We're trying to pattern our lives after him.   Even if we don't consciously apply any effort  in general, we are patterning ourselves after someone or something.  But as  disciples, as followers of Jesus, we're trying to pattern our lives after Him. And  a new year has a way of making us  reflective, right? We maybe look back at the year that's passed,  we look ahead and we ask questions like,  What do I hope to accomplish? What do I hope this new year will bring?  What needs to change?  What kind of person am I becoming?  And a lot of time, of course, at the new year, we talk about resolutions focused on doing,  eating better, exercising more, getting more sleep, being more disciplined.  But  God's word is constantly pushing us to  kind of a different  set of questions.  Not so much, what will I do this year?  But who will I become?  What kind of person  am I trying to grow to be more like?  That's the heart of  discipleship, of following Jesus.  Discipleship is not about  so much taking on religious habits, about  picking up religious activities.  It's about the slow, steady work under the intent of  trying to become more like Jesus, patterning our lives  to look like him.  And that's what makes this passage in Luke a surprising and  really kind of a perfect passage for a new year.  Because Luke is giving us a glimpse into Jesus' own  growth.  not in a moment, but over a period of time.  Have any of you ever wondered about Jesus' childhood?  Any of you who know the Bible?  We know about the manger, we know about his birth, we know about the cross, we know about the empty tomb,  we even have pictures of his  return again in glory, but between  Bethlehem and Calvary, his cross, there is almost nothing.  And Luke gives us a window into Jesus growing up years.  12 verses,  one scene where  the curtain is sort of briefly pulled back and then  closed again for another 20 years of Jesus' life. And that itself should make us slow down.  Because Luke is saying this is...  important, this is the only thing we have  about Jesus growing up.  He's  careful as an author, he's selective when the Holy Spirit inspires  one of God's uh authors to write something down, it's significant.  And so if  we have this one story from Jesus' childhood, from his youth, that should make us ask,  why this one?  because it's a picture not so much of just who Jesus is,  though it  tells us something about that. It's  a summary of how Jesus  grew,  which  I don't know if you've ever thought about it much, but Jesus actually  grew.  He didn't just  show up at 33 years old  as a fully formed adult  and start his public ministry, right?  It's a picture of how  God grew his own son, which means it's also a model for how God grows us.  how God grows his people. It's a story about growth with God, how it happens, what it looks like, and  what it produces. And  if you have your Bibles open to Luke chapter two there in verse 52, at the end of this passage  is the whole  theme.  Jesus  increased  in wisdom  and in stature and in favor with God  and man.  It's not just a throwaway summary.  It's a passage in which Jesus is not,  accomplishing something, right? He's not doing something.  It's about Jesus  growing.  And it becomes the interpretive key to this whole passage and a  point of emphasis for us.  Luke is showing us what  healthy,  God-honoring growth  looks like.  Luke gives us this in the middle of a  picture of this season of Jesus' growth.  And if the sinless son of God embraced a pattern  of growth, then that means  we can too, and we need to  as well.  And discipleship is not gonna be  instantaneous  for us,  because it wasn't for Jesus.  So this morning we're gonna see how God  grows his people through devoted pursuit and humble submission and patient formation  in ways that are doing things in us  before they really become obvious.  In other words, God works through our ordinary life  to produce extraordinary growth.  God works through your ordinary life.  to produce extraordinary growth. And we're gonna see this in four movements. There's a pattern of faithfulness, a moment of tension, a declaration of identity, and a season of hidden growth. So let's dive into that and look at it together. Verse 41, discipleship begins with a pattern of faithfulness. Luke begins this  picture, this passage in sort of an ordinary, unremarkable way. Now his parents went to Jerusalem every year  at the feast of the Passover.  That word  every  is significant.  Luke is telling us this is not a special year,  it's not  something unique, it's not a crisis, it's just  ordinary routine obedience.  Mary and Joseph are  faithful Jews.  They're not powerful, they're not perfect, they're not even important people,  but they're consistent.  And year after year,  They make the journey from where they live to Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover, the annual remembrance of God's  delivering his people, saving them from slavery in Egypt.  And Jesus grows up inside that family pattern,  that rhythm.  Before Jesus  ever  goes  and teaches in the temple, he's become used to going to the temple.  to learn and to worship with his family.  Verse 42,  if you look ahead just a little bit, reinforces that.  When he was 12 years old, they went up according to custom.  Again, routine, habit, their normal pattern.  I think Luke is saying that growth with God rarely happens in extraordinary  moments.  It usually takes place over  a long period of time through faithful patterns.  Discipleship doesn't start with  information, it starts with imitation.  And what I mean is Jesus grew up in a family  to learn what faithfulness looks  like by seeing what it looked like in his parents.  Jesus grew up in a family that modeled faithful, consistent obedience and love and worship.  Many of you may have been blessed to grow up in homes with godly parents or grandparents, older believers maybe who are at least around you in some way who are imperfect,  but who are trying to faithfully model  love for Jesus and  faithfulness to him.  Jesus grows up  watching his parents regularly orient their lives around the pattern of worship with God's people.  And scripture. and remembering and celebrating the stories of God's faithfulness.  Before Jesus  teaches his disciples to pray, he grew up no doubt watching his parents pray  and hearing them  pray.  It's foundational  for any kind of growth, especially as followers of Jesus, because  disciples  grow primarily not through intensity,  but through consistency. We'd love to have a dramatic moment of transformation and maybe you've had that in your life in some way, but that's not the thing that primarily grows us.  It's the consistent repeated  effort of  doing the same things over and over again that orient us towards God and remind us who he is. And as we begin a new year, that's important, right?  It's been said that we often overestimate what we can accomplish in a week.  but we underestimate what we can accomplish in a month or in a year.  And we underestimate similarly, I think, God can accomplish in us through faithful consistency over  periods of time.  Discipleship is not glamorous,  but it's intentional.  And I think  this passage is inviting us to ask ourselves, what  rhythms, what patterns are shaping my life?  What do I make sure happens  every day, every  week?  Maybe we even start by asking ourselves what practices are already discipling me?  What things are already shaping me?  Because something always  is.  And Luke is telling us through this picture in Jesus' life to not overlook the importance of  ordinary faithfulness.  Any kind of growth that can be measured physically, intellectually, spiritually depends on repetition. The same place, the same practice,  the same time.  Whether you want to get good at sports, whether you want to  grow in understanding uh a  subject that you're studying in school. The only way you get better at it is by  focusing on it and  repeating it.  Discipleship grows through ordinary practices that  seldom feel significant in the moment, but  matter deeply over time.  And what Jesus is  modeling for us here, what we see in his life is having grown up in a life of  worship and prayer and scripture reading and  quiet obedience.  That's where growth happens.  It's routines that grow us.  bedtime prayers and  dinner conversations and time spent with family and  Sunday mornings and Luke tells us that Jesus' parents went to Jerusalem every year for this festival, not because it was exciting, but because it was important and faithful.  Discipleship is  formed more by what we repeatedly do than by what we occasionally attempt.  So maybe as we start to look at a new year, don't ask maybe what dramatic change will I make, but what faithful practice do I wanna commit to or recommit to? Scripture, prayer, worship, and community are foundational in Jesus' life. It's a shaping. Small habits, consistently practice. Form us as students of Jesus. because God works through ordinary life to produce extraordinary growth.  And right now we haven't seen a lot of extraordinary growth, but  something is happening here.  Notice his age  in verse 42, when he was 12 years old. In Jewish life, this was sort of a threshold age. It's where you  moved from childhood into adulthood.  It's a season of transition and often in seasons of transition as  we know in our own lives.  Your first day at school, when you get your driver's license, when you go off to college, you get your first job, you get your first paycheck.  Suddenly you start to see yourself or see life in a different way. And transitions, periods of growth like this are often where  growth accelerates, which leads us to a  second thing we said, a moment of tension  in this story.  Look in verse 43.  When the feast was ended as they were returning, the boy Jesus stayed behind in Jerusalem  and his parents didn't know it.  Now, how many parents do we have in the room? Okay, if you've heard this,  you heard this, think back to when you were a parent with young kids, your heart probably just sank, right?  Your heart rate accelerates, right?  I have no idea where my child is.  Most parents know that feeling of momentary panic. Not even just parents though. I I remember as a kid being in a  large department store, things that we used to have many years ago.  It a big retail place that you went to and had a bunch of stuff and lots of aisles and you had to go pick it out physically.  I looked around, I had no idea where my parents were.  And we were in a store uh town visiting my grandparents far away. So it was like, don't know  even how to get home, back to my grandparents' house. I don't know where my parents are. It's  looking up in a panic and realizing, I don't know where  my folks are, I don't know how to get home, I don't know what's going on.  Mary and Joseph lived in this state of panic for  apparently three days.  Luke doesn't rush past it  because growth often comes with disorientation,  being thrown off of what we expect.  Sometimes...  I love how one commentator put it, sometimes discipleship begins when we realize we've been assuming Jesus is with us.  He's just around. He's around, obviously,  instead of actively seeking him.  I don't want to make a ton of that, but I think there's an interesting insight there.  Well,  to the context,  remember the culture, okay? This would have been a sizable caravan of multiple families traveling together, relatives, neighbors, friends,  and it wouldn't have been unusual for a 12-year-old in this,  you know, transitioning from  childhood to adulthood to go back and forth between these groups of men and women and children and adults, but  after a full day's journey,  they realize he's missing.  And verse 44, look, supposing him to be in the group, they went a day's journey, but then they began to search for him among the relatives and acquaintances. The language here is understated. mean, Luke doesn't dramatize it, but you can feel it. I mean, any of you probably felt that, like concern starts to turn to panic and panic can turn to dread? Verse 45, when they didn't find him, they returned to Jerusalem searching for him. Three days total, one day out, one day searching, one day returning.  Three days of anxiety and questions and concerns like,  how did we lose the son of God? This is not gonna go well, right?  This is one of the,  oh,  small but most comforting passages in scripture.  Even  faithful  people  experience moments of confusion and fear.  Even God's most faithful people  will experience moments of confusion  and fear.  Mary carried Jesus in her womb.  Joseph, remember, was warned in a dream to flee from Herod's soldiers who were trying to kill him. Joseph protected the infant Jesus  and still  they lose him.  Faithful obedience doesn't protect us from moments of disorientation and confusion and even fear  in our walk with God.  Because sometimes growth with God feels like  loss and confusion before you get to clarity.  Sometimes walking with God faithfully  can mean confusion and disorientation.  I love how intentional.  Lucas, he's honest about this experience of what it means to walk with God. Disorientation, anxiety, a sense that something is off. And that's maybe relevant for all of us.  Maybe we've come through a year of a lot of disorientation and  did it turn out the way for any of us that we thought it was gonna turn out?  You're heading into a new year,  hoping for clarity and ease and momentum.  And scripture suggests something else, that God often grows us by unsettling us,  by shaking us up.  Sometimes discipleship begins when our assumptions are challenged.  Sometimes growth happens when what used to work no longer works.  Sometimes growth is  empowered because we have to  lose sight of what we thought we understood about Jesus or what we expected of him in order to actually see him for who he is.  Sometimes God has to strip away our own perceptions of who we think Jesus is and what he's supposed to be doing.  That discomfort is not failure, it's not faithlessness,  it's an invitation.  Expect  God to stretch you.  This may be how we could summarize this part of the story.  Discipleship feels uncomfortable. That may be a sign of growth, not failure,  not faithlessness.  God often disrupts us  in order to deepen us.  God works through our ordinary life, the uncertainty, the anxiety, the  disquiet.  to produce extraordinary growth.  Then there's a uh declaration of identity.  Look how the story goes on, verse 46.  After three days,  after three days, they found him in the temple, sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions.  Now just first,  notice the posture here, I love this.  Jesus is  sitting and asking questions. He's not standing and posing.  He's not leading and lecturing. He's asking. He's not showing off. It's humility paired with hunger. And yet in verse 47, all who heard him were amazed at his understanding and his answers. Luke is not trying to say Jesus is just, well, look how impressive he is, like how precocious he is.  That's not the point.  There's a depth here,  a spiritual maturity that surprises even the religious leaders.  But then his parents show up.  Verse 48, and when his parents saw him, they were astonished.  And  his mother says, son, why have you treated us like this?  How many times have the parent of you said this?  Why did you do this to us?  Behold, your father and I have been searching for you in great distress.  But Jesus was not doing anything wrong.  It's a plea.  And  notice how Mary frames it as your father and I, but Jesus' response  is the theological center of this whole passage.  Why were you looking for me?  Didn't you know  that I must be  in my Father's house?  The first recorded words of Jesus in scripture.  Which means they have some significance.  And what do they reveal?  A couple things, uh a conscious sense  of his divine sonship. Jesus distinguishes between how Mary wants to frame this as your father and I,  and Jesus saying, my father, my ultimate father, my true  father.  He's 12.  He's still growing. And he knows  who he is. He knows who his  real  eternal father is.  It's not arrogance, it's clarity.  And I think Lucas pointing out for us that growth with God becomes  with a deepening awareness of belonging.  Belonging to God as his child.  Before Jesus does any miracles, before he performs any signs, before he preaches any sermons, he knows this.  I am a child of my Father in heaven. And that is the most true thing about me. There's this conscious sense of sonship, but then a compelling sense of calling.  Did you notice this? I must be,  I must do this thing.  That word  must appears over and over in Luke's gospel, and of course it gives this sense of  divine necessity, the thing that has to be central, the thing that is so important.  Purpose, alignment with God's will and God's plan.  Jesus is not wandering,  he's not being rebellious, he's not being careless, he's not even being thoughtless towards Mary and Joseph, he is compelled  by devotion to his heavenly father.  And it's meant to raise the question for us, I think,  who comes first? Who gets my heart?  Even good things, family expectations, cultural norms,  personal plans  are all subjected to  devotion to the Father. That's what frames them all. That's what  defines them all.  What puts boundaries around them all.  It doesn't eliminate relationships. Jesus isn't uncaring towards his parents,  his earthly parents, but it rightly orders  that relationship.  Jesus  is implicitly saying, look, I love you, of course,  but I have to love my Father in heaven most of all.  And yet in verse 50,  probably like most of us,  they didn't understand the saying that he spoke to them.  Even Mary and Joseph, even these  godly, faithful people who have raised him for 12 years did not understand  him. did not get what he was doing or what he was about.  And that means we can love Jesus fully,  walk with him faithfully and not understand what he's doing or saying to us.  Hopefully that's encouraging.  I think that's the point of it.  Growth with God will put us in moments  over and over and over again where obedience will outpace our understanding.  Mary and Joseph do not understand what Jesus is telling them,  but they're still called to be obedient  to what he's telling them  and to even take a step back in their expectation of their role in his life and their importance in his life.  Discipleship is not built on total understanding, it's built on trust.  Can I trust who Jesus is  when I don't understand what he's doing? uh Every once in a while, growth becomes visible. There's a moment of clarity. Maybe it's a conversation, a realization where you can say something is different now. And  for many of us, if you have come to faith in Jesus, you may have a moment in your life where you can point back to that.  very clear decision to say, I knew before this day I wasn't a Christian and I now am a Christian.  And if that's not true of you, whether  or not you've had that experience and you're following Jesus, if you have not come to the point of knowing and following Jesus,  let this be the moment of clarity for you. Let this day be the one  where you say, I want to follow Jesus.   I walked in here not really knowing whether I belong to Jesus and am following Him, but I want to leave here  loving and trusting and following Him.  Every once in a while,  growth becomes visible.  Maybe there's a moment for some of you today where this would be the day  where that kind of growth takes place.  Jesus' words in the temple are one of those moments  where he says,  must be  in my Father's house. I must seek my Father. I must build my life around  him.  I pray that that's true for all of you here.  The following Jesus always involves clarifying who  or what has first place in our lives  and what we're going to be defined by.  Jesus' words  implicitly  confront us. Who has my allegiance?  What will I build my life around? Discipleship means examining my life and ordering my loves, my desires, my plans  rightly.  Underneath devotion to the Father, the God who created us and who loves us and who intends good for us.  God works through ordinary life to produce extraordinary growth.  And there is  then a season of hidden growth that happens here  at the end of this passage.  What's striking about  any  perception, any sense of long-term growth is how much of it happens between the visible moments.  Right, like sometimes you ever ask a question or wonder like why doesn't God just show up and do a miracle like he did in the Bible, right? Like why doesn't he intervene?  You know, the Bible covers literally thousands of years of human history and there's only about three or four major periods of miracles happening.  over those thousands of years.  Most of the time, God is working in the ordinary, everyday,  in and out rhythms of  regular life between the visible moments. There's  long stretches of our lives where nothing seems to be changing.  And Luke gives us almost  no details  about what happened in Jesus' life between age 12 and age 30,  but he tells us this, Jesus  grew. And this is maybe where the passage surprises us a little. After this amazing insight of divine self-awareness, look in verse 51. He went down with them from Jerusalem, so physically go down from Jerusalem, and came to Nazareth and was submissive to them. His mother treasured up all these things in her heart and Jesus increased, increased in wisdom and in stature and in favor with God and man. Now,  think about this, the sinless Son of God, the creator of heaven and earth,  the eternal  begotten Son of God who made Mary and Joseph themselves,  goes down to Jerusalem,  returns to Nazareth and is submissive to them. No miracles, no teaching ministry, no public platform, just  obedience.  Ordinary, everyday life.  Some of you are not gonna see any obvious growth or fruit in your life this year.  Doesn't mean nothing is happening.  Jesus grew for years  before his public ministry ever took place.  It's not overnight transformation, it's slow formation. Most of it happens  off stage, behind the scenes,  right? In the ordinary everyday life for  nearly 20 years, the Son of God just lives in faithful  obscurity.  It corrects  maybe one of our biggest,  I don't know if it's a misunderstanding or just maybe an expectation or a hope,  but the reality is this, that God often does deep work in us when nothing feels impressive.  God is often doing significant work in us,  not in moments of flashy inspiration, but in ordinary,  everyday life.  How does Jesus grow?  in the same ways that we're called to grow, in wisdom, in stature, and in favor with God and with other people.  It tells us a couple of things. One, that growth is  holistic,  right? That God cares about all our lives. Jesus grows in  wisdom.  In other words, God cares about the growth of our mind and our knowledge  and our ability to apply knowledge to living rightly.  according to the way God has created us and created this world. That Jesus grows in stature. It's a reminder that our bodies matter. God created us with bodies. are body, spirit combined together. So we discipline ourselves and steward or manage our bodies for our health and our growth. Jesus grows in favor with God. It's a reminder that we're called to apply ourselves to grow in spiritual maturity. And Jesus grows in favor with man. He's telling us that we care about others. Like relationships matter profoundly and we want to nurture healthy, loving relationships with other people. So that when people encounter us, we're a joy to them and a blessing, not a burden, not a difficulty, not a frustration. God's design for our growth is never one dimensional. He grows us fully, not just spiritually detached beings, but as an actual embodied life, a whole person. And that growth is often hidden. And we've talked about this before. From age 12 to 30, we don't know what Jesus was doing, but it was not wasted time because Jesus was growing. Years of preparation, years of growth, years where the Son of God learned obedience and humility and  love and faithfulness and obscurity.  And growth happens through  humility,  through humbleness.  Jesus  is submissive to his parents, not because he is less than them. He's obviously not less than them.  But because submission is the pathway of love, it's the expression of love, of  doing what is right in relation to one another in obedience to the Father.  Growth with God depends on humbleness and deepens it at the same time. It's sort of a reinforcing  cycle.  So what does it mean for us?  Just a few thoughts in conclusion here. uh Expect times of confusion.  If you've ever said, God, I don't understand what you're doing, you're in good company.  Because Mary and Joseph said the same thing. Understanding is not a prerequisite for growth. Trust  is the prerequisite for growth.  Embrace the hidden seasons.  Not every season is visible, not every year is dramatic. Some of our most Christ-like growth may be happening in  hidden, ordinary, everyday life.  And make sure that we're measuring growth the right way.  We often measure growth by output, and God measures growth by formation,  by the kind of people that we're becoming,  wisdom, character, humility, faithfulness.  God  works through ordinary life to produce extraordinary growth.  I'm so glad that Luke gave us this little insight into Jesus' life. And not just to satisfy our curiosity, but to shape our expectations because  Jesus didn't  cut to the front of the line because he was the son of God, right?  Like he didn't have a shortcut  or a fast pass,  right? He didn't skip the process. He entered fully into human development, growing  in every way that we grow.  Discipleship means  then it's not rushed.  It's not shallow. It's not immediate. It's measured by growth in wisdom and character and love  and faithfulness.  And what this ultimately telling us is the God  who calls us to grow with him  is the God who has walked a path of growth himself. eh The God who is calling us to grow with him is the God who has walked a path of growth himself.  As we begin a new year, discipleship isn't about  coming up with a list of resolutions and things we're suddenly going to take on to try and become someone else overnight. It's about  trusting God in the long work of formation and believing that He's at work even when I can't see it,  and maybe especially when it doesn't seem to make any sense.  Imagine  December of 2026. We're all here worshiping a year from now.   And we're  hopefully not gonna be asking ourselves whether I kept every resolution, whether I checked all the boxes that I marked off, but I think the questions to ask are gonna be,  did I take steps to help God grow me in humility, in patience, in love, in kindness,  in faithfulness?  Kind of growth doesn't happen overnight, but it does happen  when we walk with Jesus  faithfully one step at a time.  Discipleship doesn't.  happen  by knowing, you know, the long view and having everything planned out, but simply trusting God with the next step.  The next step today,  this week.  The Jesus who calls you to grow to be like Him is the Jesus who knows what it means to grow.  I find that so incredibly encouraging.  He's patient,  he's present, he's powerful, and he's committed to our growth in the best kind of way,  into  a full, whole,  joyful life.  So wherever you are today,  whether you're  confident or confused, hopeful, anxious about the future, you can be encouraged  that growth with God is happening. Growth with God will happen as we embrace.  the ordinary faithful practices  and trust him in all the unseen moments.  Let's begin the year  asking God not just  merely to  change us  or especially not to just change our circumstances but to grow us.  To look more like Jesus in the middle of our ordinary lives.  Let me pray for him. Father, thank you for the gift of a new year  and the reminder, the hope that you are not finished with us no matter our age.  We thank you for your son Jesus who did not  shortcut the process  but grew through obedience and wisdom and stature  in favor with you and others. Help us to be encouraged to walk that same path.  As we step into a new year, free us from the pressure to feel like we need to change everything at once, but also free us from the  hopelessness that we can't change.  Give us grace to take the next faithful step.  Show up in prayer to listen to your word,  to walk in obedience,  to live in community,  trusting you with the work of our growth.  Oh Lord, some of us feel discouraged or unseen.  Remind us that you do your deepest work in confusing circumstances.  Some of us feel impatient or restless.  Give us faith to trust your timing.  Some of us feel uncertain or stretched or empty.  Anchor us in the hope and the promise that you're near.  Shape us Lord into people who love you more deeply, who reflect your character more clearly and walk with you faithfully.  We place this year ourselves  into your hands,  trusting in your faithfulness.  Pray this in the name of Jesus who walks with us, who grows us,  and has promised that he will bring to completion the good work that he has begun in us.  Amen.