Persisting Through 2025

I didn't realize just how appropriate my word of the year would become.

Photo by Lucas Chizzali on Unsplash

At the start of 2025, Emily and I sat down to create vision boards for the year. While I love casting goals for a new year, this particular exercise is not one I’ve done before.

We wrote down a slew of ambitions and goals, from personal and relational to financial and vocational. At the end, we chose a word for the year.

Mine? Persistence.

After years of working toward writing a book and completing a book proposal — only to be derailed by major life events like a pandemic, a tornado hitting our house, career changes, and illnesses — choosing this word was my way of drawing a proverbial line in the sand that no matter what life threw at me in 2025, this goal was finally going to be checked off.

Here I sit on December 31 with a completed book proposal, only needing some fine-tuning per my literary agent’s suggestions before it’s sent to publishers for their review.

I had chosen persistence thinking primarily about productivity — about finishing, achieving, and finally moving something across the line. What I didn’t know when I chose persistence as my word was how much it would come to mean staying faithful when there was nothing to finish at all.

This year didn’t just introduce obstacles, it became a masterclass in endurance. After nearly two painful years of infertility, Emily underwent laparoscopic surgery in January to help identify any potential causes for why we haven’t been able to get pregnant. The doctor couldn’t determine anything, which was both confusing but also encouraging. We were hopeful that a child would be on the way soon.

Instead, Emily and I walked through yet another year of infertility. In some ways, it feels like we’re back where we were at the start of the year. This experience has continued to rewire how we think about time, hope, and prayer.

Additionally, my father spent nearly the entire year in and out of cancer treatments, living in that exhausting in-between of scan results and waiting rooms, gratitude and fear coexisting uncomfortably close together. He spent time in the emergency room in Indianapolis around Father’s Day, then spent six weeks in Tennessee to receive daily radiation treatment. Now, he’s closing out the year with chemotherapy.

I am so grateful that he has handled all of this so well, but seeing him go through this has been hard on our entire family, especially my stepmother. It is such a helpless feeling when someone you love has cancer. All we can do is pray and continue to be there for my dad, which our whole family has done.

In September, I unexpectedly lost my job after my company went through a major downsizing. I’ve spent the last several months applying endlessly to jobs while scrounging up whatever freelance work I can find in the meantime to help pay our bills.

Over the summer, Emily lost her grandmother, and along the way, we watched friends we love endure tragedies so heavy there were no words that could make them lighter.

We’ve dealt with physical ailments as well, like a torn meniscus and fractured knee for me, and lingering illnesses for both Emily and myself. Those feel minor in comparison to the other stuff, but they were still unpleasant to deal with.

But even in the midst of all of this were blessings. The unexpected time off from work meant I had time to visit my dad when he was living in Tennessee for cancer treatments. We got to hang out with just the two of us, play a lot of golf, and have good conversation. I wouldn’t have been able to do this if I was working full-time.

I was also able to start my own creative business where I’ve gotten to work with a variety of clients doing some really cool work. I’ve gotten to experience the freedom of working for myself and learning a ton about who I am as a person and a writer.

Persistence, it turns out, is not glamorous. It’s not the clenched-fist, highlight-reel version we tend to celebrate. Instead, it’s showing up on days when momentum is gone. It’s opening the laptop when your heart isn’t in it. It’s choosing faith when certainty feels unavailable. It’s continuing to love, hope, write, pray, and believe when everything in you would rather shut down or self-protect.

There were times this year where the last thing I wanted to was pray. I was angry, tapped out on hope, and felt like my prayers were falling on deaf ears. I know better, but my selfish, human soul was overcome by disappointment and continued hope deferred.

I saw a post recently where someone said, “why do I have to pray for God to give me things that others get without praying at all?” Honestly, I felt that. And I’m sure have, too. It’s hard not to be envious of other people getting what we hope for.

But someone replied to that post with a truth that, while I know it to be true, don’t always remember: we don’t pray so that God gives us things. We pray so that we draw closer to Him.

Prayer isn’t asking a genie to grant a wish. It’s about the communication and relationship with Him. It’s about understanding His character and His ways on a deeper level. Whether or not my prayers are answered should not be the reason I pray at all.

I may never understand why certain desires of mine aren’t met or continue to be delayed. But at the same time, I don’t want the things I don’t understand about God to undermine the things I know for certain about God, which is that He loves me and has my best interest in mind.

That perspective is rarely easy, but it’s always crucial. Through all of this, Emily and I got closer in our marriage, and our reliance and trust in the Lord grew exponentially.

There were many moments this year when the completed book proposal felt small compared to the grief orbiting our lives. Times when progress felt almost inappropriate. But persistence didn’t mean ignoring the pain or powering through it. It meant refusing to let suffering have the final word. It meant believing that creating something good and honest could coexist with loss — that faithfulness in small things still mattered when life felt anything but stable.

So yes, the proposal is finished. And I’m grateful. But the greater work of this year wasn’t checking off a goal, it was learning what persistence actually costs, and what it quietly produces: not certainty or control, but a deeper resilience and a reminder that sometimes the bravest thing you can do is simply keep going.

I didn’t choose persistence knowing what 2025 would ask of me. But looking back, I can’t imagine a more fitting word for the year that was.