Onward and Upward

The past few days have been wonderful. Candlelight service, special music, special food, snowstorm, sitting by the fire, unwrapping presents and feeling His presence. All the things I love about Christmas.

This week between Christmas and New Year's Day is always a nice, slower paced week. This is one in which I will spend reading, sewing, planning for the new year, and spending time reflecting on the past year.

I'm heading back down to North Carolina next weekend to start the process of cleaning out the house. It's not a task I'm looking forward to, but I am looking forward to spending time with my sister who is coming too.

We are coming to the end of our first year here at our new church and even though it's been much different than we thought, we are thankful. It's been a time of leading a church through an unexpected pandemic and while challenging and stretching, it's been a good year. 

I listened to a podcast yesterday by Harvard Business School historian, Nancy Koehn, entitled, "Courageous Leadership in a Time of a Global Crisis" and it was excellent. One of the takeaways was leadership isn't about looking back and saying, "I can't wait to get back to the way it was," but looking forward and leading through the crisis into the future. That was a good reminder. Keep moving forward. Rise to the challenge. Onward and upward.

Hmmm, it seems that there may be some goals for the New Year in there somewhere. 😉