Maybe it’s because my birthday comes so close to the start of the new year, but there’s just something about turning a year older that makes me reflect on the past year. I like that final glance backwards before moving forwards. A proverbial looking at the sunset in the rearview mirror, if you will. (Apparently, I even wrote about it in 2016!)

So here, in no particular order, are the 5 lessons I learned in 2024:

1. “Where will you be in 5 years?” is a useless question. If you had told me in 2019 that in 2024 I would leave the company I had worked at for nearly 20 years, I would tell you that doesn’t seem quite right. If you then told me that I would leave a church where I had found community and healing to be a part of a new church plant, I would say that you must be talking about a different Brandy. And then if you told me that both Mike and I would be seminary students, I would have rolled on the floor laughing. Yet, all those things happened in 2024. This year I experienced so much change. Much of it was tinged with grief. Some of it was freeing. Some of it was terrifying. And every bit of it needed to happen.
2. Running towards something is so much better than running away from something. There have been so many seasons of my life when I have been tempted to run away from things — jobs, relationships, conflict. This was a year filled with running towards things. It felt different. Instead of fear, there was hope. Instead of exhaustion, I found energy.
3. Make decisions from love and not fear. This is very closely connected to #2, but a very wise person told me this year that I needed to make decisions from a place of love, not fear. That has stuck with me all year, and there have been so many times that I teetered on the edge of a decision and asked myself that question. I have made a lot of decisions out of fear in my life — fear of abandonment, fear of loss, fear of scarcity. This year, I tried to make as many decisions as I could out of love — love for others, love for my family and love for self.
4. Finding “your people” is life-changing. I feel like this year was one of me really settling into community. I’m married to someone who knows and loves me. I have friends in my life who feel like family. I have a writing group that feels like a salve for my soul. I have peers in my doctoral program who I connected with quickly and deeply. I am surrounded by a church family who cares about loving others well. I have maintained relationships even as I have left jobs and places of worship. It’s not always been easy. But it has always been rich and rewarding.
5. Hold your hopes in open hands. This one kind of sums up everything else. This year has been one where dreams deferred have finally come to fruition — but rarely in the ways that I would have expected. The details are still tender, but there has been a lot of healing of wounds, and a lot of imagination for how God is at work. The stories are still unfolding. I’m just trying to remember that holiness and creativity are deeply intertwined.

As I step into 45, I’m excited for what this next year holds. I pray my sacred imagination can keep up!

I have a little secret for you. I hate feeling out of control.

But did you hear that a few months ago I launched my freelance writing career? And guess who has very little control over things like workload and what clients decide to work with you and when that work comes?

That’s right! Freelance writers!

When I worked as an editorial manager, I would always tell my team, “control the controllable.” So a few weeks ago, I decided that one thing I could control, when I’m not politely pestering potential clients, was how I’m keeping my creative spirit alive. About a year ago I was introduced to the idea of artist dates, solo outings that “spark whimsy.” So this week, I decided to venture out east to a farm stand. Farmer’s markets are one of my favorite things. I love wandering the aisles, carefully choosing perfectly ripe tomatoes and freshly baked bread.

On the drive out I took in the wide open plains of eastern Colorado Springs, the bright blue sky meeting the dusty fields on the horizon. I parked in a large gravel lot, grabbed a basket and browsed for whimsy.

I grabbed handfuls of tiny red tomatoes labeled “flavor bombs.” I put six ears of corn in my basket, already shucked because I’m lazy. I picked up a bouquet of basil, tied with a rough piece of twine. A bag of handmade pasta flavored with sun-dried tomatoes and garlic. I placed two waxy zucchini in last, with plans of putting them in a loaf of zucchini bread, robbing them of nutrition but gifting them chocolate chips.

As I drove home, the smell of the basil filled the car. And I decided that I would make a meal with my bounty. And — this is crucial — I wasn’t going to use a recipe.

You must know, I am a recipe gal. I love to bake, and baking is precise. I have not one, but two baking scales. Two sets of measuring cups. Three sets of measuring spoons. More liquid measuring cups than I can even count. So this idea of cooking without a recipe was pure WHIMSY!

But I felt this deep longing to lay down control. In every area of my life I felt like I was wrestling for control, meaning, understanding, answers. Why not let dinner be free of the wrestle.

Tonight was the group loss of control dinner. I marinated the chicken in tangy balsamic and dijon, sweet honey and brown sugar. I blended handfuls of basil with fresh lemon juice and olive oil — the good kind in the metal container. I cut the corn off of the cob and sautéed it with shallots, garlic and bacon. I boiled the pasta, saving some of the starchy water for the end.

I tasted and sniffed and tossed in red pepper flakes. I stirred, splashed in a bit of pasta water, stirred again. The kosher salt I sprinkled on at the end stuck to my fingers, sticky with lemon juice and basil.

It was out of control. It was delicious.

Hey, look at me! I have no idea what I’m doing!

Nearly six weeks ago, I closed the door on a nearly 18-year career as a writer at a non-profit. In many ways, it was my dream job. I had the privilege of traveling across the globe, meeting amazing people and delivering their stories to hundreds of thousands of supporters. My eyes were opened to the plight of those in poverty, and my heart still bears a million microscopic scars of understanding.

But, it was time to move on. I had felt unsettled for months. I knew that things at work were changing, and it felt like the right time to launch my own new version. Brandy 2.0.

For a month, I made the very intentional decision to rest and recover. I caught up with friends. I did a TON of reading. But in the back of my mind, I heard this hateful little whisper.

“What are you DOING?” it asked. “What is your PURPOSE.”

I have been working full-time without a break of more than two weeks for more than 21 years. As a single person, work was my identity. Even as a married woman, work was still the thing that defined me. Gave me a reason to get up in the morning. My job gave me worth. Value. A purpose.

I told myself that after my month off, I would jump head-first into freelance writing. I’ve wanted to do this for years and am excited to finally explore this new career. But building a client base is a slow, steady process.

That voice got louder. I wasn’t earning my keep. Wasn’t helping to support our household. To be clear, nobody outside of that voice in my head was telling me that. But man, was it a loud voice.

I decided I should cook more. Clean more. My husband would come home and I would rattle off a list of all of the chores I had done that day. He was grateful but confused. I had been a mediocre housecleaner for the past five years. He certainly didn’t marry me because of how well I mopped the floors.

But now I cleaned like a mad woman. “See!” I shouted, “I am valuable!” Only, he never thought I wasn’t valuable.

Tonight, I discussed this very topic with our counselor. She said, “How old is the part of you that’s saying that?”

I laughed out loud. I was fully in the “Hey, look at me!” part of myself. The little girl who wanted attention, who stood and waved her arms and begged people to notice her.

On the drive home tonight, I thought about my plan for the next several months—a time of uncertainty and more waiting than I am comfortable with. I wondered, how can I give shape, instead of purpose, to my days? I don’t do well wandering the house, eyes glazed and hair unbrushed. But I also need to learn to live without the black-and-white task lists that give me a scorecard for the day.

So, I will keep cleaning the house, but make it less about earning my keep and more about caring for the home we live in. I will keep connecting with friends, but I will also start to get comfortable connecting with myself. I will go on solo artist dates and long walks, and hopefully, I will write about them here.

Because I am a writer. Whether I’m getting a paycheck for it or not!

Can I be honest? Last year was not my favorite. I’m not one to believe that January 1 is some magical day where everything resets, but there is something really beautiful about new beginnings. About being able to leave a hard year in the past.

A week ago, on the first day of 2023, I pulled a long-neglected jar of sourdough starter out of the fridge. If you’ve ever dealt with sourdough, you know that old starter is somewhat frightening. It develops a layer of “hooch” on the top, a dark liquid that floats on top of the thickened starter. It smells strong, but not unpleasant. I dipped my bread dough whisk into the jar, and stirred the gluey, gray mixture. I have faith that it isn’t ruined. That after a few days of patient feeding, it will come back to life. Bubbly and resembling an actual ingredient, not some weird gloopy mess.

The first loaf I made wasn’t perfect. My technique was a little clumsy, and my impatience led to an inch of doughy bread at the bottom of each piece. But enough salted butter and you could barely notice.

Tonight, I started my second batch. This time the starter woke up much quicker. It remembered its job. I tried a new recipe tonight that requires me to gently fold the dough in on itself every 30 minutes. The first time, my hand was covered in dough, sticky and messy. But each subsequent fold it becomes firmer. It begins to feel right, somehow.

After the last fold, I will cover the dough for the night. While I sleep, it will rise. I hope. Because bread requires a measure of hope. Faith in the starter that just a few weeks ago looked like a forgotten science experiment in my refrigerator.

In the morning, I will fold and divide and let it rise again. And finally, hours and hours after I started this process I will pull out a fresh loaf of sourdough bread. Mike will toast me pieces and bring them with my morning coffee. I will eat rushed sandwiches on it in-between meetings. I will spread peanut butter on it and eat it as an open-faced snack while I prepare dinner.

Tonight, as I stirred and folded and waited, I began to think about how this could be the year of sourdough. A year of trusting the process, even when it seems messy and broken. A year of slowing down, knowing that some things can only be accomplished through time and patience.

Perhaps most importantly, may 2023 be a year of enjoying the simple things. Of tangy sourdough starter. A dish of softened butter. A slice of perfectly toasted bread alongside a warm cup of coffee.

What is your 2023 a year of?

Twenty months ago, I bought a violet to mark the first month of our adoption journey. And what a journey it has been. There have been thoughtful plants that I have poured over in the aisles of our local garden store. One that we bought in California and brought inside hotels to keep it warm on our 20+ hour road trip. We have two plants gifted to us from clippings, and I carefully monitored them, breathless, until they produced new buds. We have plants that have been gifted to us, fancy plants and grocery store plants.

But then, there are the ones that haven’t survived. That very first violet died tragically, snapped off at its fragile neck while I pruned it. A few had beautiful flowers but then never grew again. Right now, there are no less than three plants that look limp and yellow and scraggly.

We stopped buying plants when we got matched. And when our adoption was disrupted, I consciously decided not to start again. Aside from a lovely plant left on the front porch by friends, I just couldn’t add to our menagerie.

The plants were supposed to represent growth in the waiting. But now, where our hope had once flourished, it just felt dry and rootless.

That’s why I was so surprised on Saturday when I looked at Mike and said “I think we need to buy a plant.”

I can’t explain what prompted it, but I felt like we needed to bring something living into our home. Something that reminded us what it felt like all those months ago.

We roamed the aisle of our favorite garden store, and there we spotted a plant unlike any I had ever seen. It was a strange mix of flowers and spindly branches. It wasn’t pretty or neatly shaped. In a word, it felt wild.

I quickly looked it up on my phone to make sure it wasn’t too finicky, and I saw, in bold letters, TOXIC. And I laughed out loud.

In my hands, I held a plant that was both wild and dangerous. It was perfect. Because right now, as we grieve the loss of an adoption, as we try to keep moving forward, hope feels wild and dangerous.

Wild and dangerous. It’s interesting to me that those two words can be used to describe something exhilarating as well as something excruciating. Skydiving is wild and dangerous. But so is a car spinning on the ice. Traveling to an exotic land is wild and dangerous. As is a bear stumbling onto a trail near a group of hikers.

Twenty months ago, hope felt exhilarating. Getting a match was scary in the best possible way. But when the bottom fell out, exhilaration turned into a terrifying free fall. Scary turned into crushed.

But that plant, with its sinewy arms and its delicate flowers is a symbol that we are clinging to hope. A hope that leaves us exposed and vulnerable. That feels toxic and untamed. When I look at our new plant, I feel a tightness in my chest. Roots wrapped around a tender spot.

Protecting. Growing. Wild. Dangerous.

I was baking a coffee cake when we got the call. Pillowy cake studded with tart pockets of rhubarb, showered in a gingery crumble that was warm in your mouth even if the cake was cold. I was baking it on Thursday, in preparation for Easter. We were supposed to leave the next morning to meet the birth mother who was scheduled to give birth in just a few weeks to the child we were planning to adopt.

When the phone rang, I answered it carefully, my hands sticky with rhubarb.

It was the news that every person on an adoption journey dreads. She had changed her mind. The baby that had always been hers would now forever be hers. And we were left with dreams shattered and coffee cake crumbs covering the counter.

It was over a week ago, but the memories from the days that followed are still vivid. Last night as I lay in bed, the grief softened but still very much there, I was struck by how those days have a literal taste to them.

Thursday, mere hours after the news, milkshakes showed up on our doorstep, delivered by a sweet friend. We cried and drank them, the thick, cold pushing past the hardness in our throats.

Later that evening, our church showed up, knelt in front of us and handed us bread and wine. The body and the blood. I wept and chewed — bread with an edge of bitterness from the cloves and molasses, wine sweet and biting.

Over the next few days, friends brought take out and soup and sandwiches — warm and nourishing things that we ate nestled next to each other on the couch. They also dropped off brownies and cookies and ice cream, sweet to counter the sharp.

On Sunday, we hosted Easter brunch, desperate to feel normal for a few hours. The coffee cake made its appearance. I expected to be able to taste sadness in it, but it was, in fact, delicious. The day also tasted of burnt bacon, grief clouding my mind, forgetting to set the timer. It tasted of good coffee and steak smoky from the grill. Of salty tears when I snuck off to the bedroom to cry and breathe deeply.

The following week friends continued to nourish us. Cuban black bean soup, whispered prayers, burrito bowls, long hugs, fresh bread and reminders we are not alone.

This morning I woke up thinking, we made it another week. It has been 12 days since that phone call. And the remnants of our grief and the boundless love we have received are everywhere. A full refrigerator. A closed nursery door. Flowers and phone calls and late night tears.

We are loved. We are shattered. We are.

There’s a phenomenon in our home that we like to call “chopping down a tree on the back forty.” I can’t even remember where we stumbled upon it, surely on some clever person’s social media. But the idea is, when you are having a big party, with tons of people coming over to your house, and your husband disappears for the day to cut down a tree on the back forty — the part of your land that nobody would ever see.

In real world terms, it’s vacuuming our your car before the party starts. Or organizing the garage. Or vacuuming the storage room. Or any list of things that nobody would ever see or consider. I also like to call it “procrastiductivity” — a time of hyper productivity when deep down you’re really procrastinating as hard as humanly possible.

Friends, the last two months of my life I have been chopping down trees on the back forty.

As many of you know, Mike and I were matched for our adoption recently. We are holding the details of that match closely, pondering them in our hearts until the time comes to share. And as we are preparing for a child to enter our home, it looks like I am being super productive. This many Amazon packages haven’t landed on our porch since we were wedding planning! All day, I read articles and compile lists and ask questions and do research. I am productive with a capital P!

But I am also procrastinating with a capital P. Just yesterday, as I was putting away some groceries, I thought, “I have to reorganize our pantry before the baby!”

Please know, I understand that our baby could not care less if our pantry is organized. Our friends will not peek into our pantry to judge us. But that pantry is my tree on the back forty.

My heart feels bruised. My emotions are in a constant state of whiplash. But I can control my pantry. I can neatly line up my oils and vinegars. Meticulously organize my seven kinds of flour (I promise, not an exaggeration). Every thing in its place as life itself feels out of place.

There’s grace on the back forty though. There’s peace in the pantry that I can’t find in the nursery right now. And that’s okay. Clearing the back forty gives us a place to breathe and cry and laugh and hope. When I feel myself going there, hiding in the wild woods, I must remind myself to lay down my chainsaw and rest. To wipe down my pantry shelves and breathe.

To put aside both productivity and procratination and just BE.

Two years ago, almost to the day, I sat in my favorite music venue, Red Rocks, not knowing that in a matter of months the world would shut down. As I sat beneath the stars that night, singing along to the music, my husband of just three months at my side, I didn’t know. Nobody knew.

Live music is one of the things I missed the most in 2020. Sitting shoulder to shoulder with strangers, bound only by the artist on the stage in front of you. I’ve watched Bruce Springsteen crowd surf, wondering how his back feels the next morning after bouncing over the hands of strangers. I’ve clutched a friend’s hands, tears streaming down my face, as I listened to Brandi Carlile sing “The Story” under a Colorado sky that stretched so far it made my heart ache. I’ve seen guitar strings break, artists gasp for breath in the thin air and a singer who had so many beers throughout his set that he forgot the words by the end of the night. But we helped him along. We knew the words even when he didn’t.

That’s a good audience.

Then, in 2020, it all just stopped. Tickets that we had purchased were refunded. Venues closed. And as we plodded into 2021, we didn’t know when it would ever end.

But in a moment of faith, we got tickets to the Avett Brothers at Red Rocks for July. And then time marched on. We got our vaccines. Got our second ones. And slowly, slowly, the world began to open again. We wondered. Would it happen?

And two nights ago, on a clear Colorado evening, we were back. We got there hours early and tailgated in the parking lot. We walked up the stairs and stood in line and made friends with the couple in front of us (hi Shirley and Jerry!) We told stories and laughed and everything felt shockingly — normal.

Hours later, as the sun went down and the lyrics floated across the air, it felt holy. “We’re here,” said one of the brothers, “and you’re here.” The music felt different, somehow. Weightier. Profound in a way that surprised me. I closed my eyes and sang loud, together, joining a big, messy, beautiful choir. I danced with my husband of two years, and laughed. And we remembered to be grateful. Always to be grateful.

This is not “back to normal.” It’s not even “new normal.” It’s life lived to the fullest. With the memory that sometimes life gets small. And we hold our breath until it’s big again.

That night. We breathed.