As this godawful year walks its green mile with just over 24 hours to go I refuse to look back, only forward. Without any reminiscence time, do you ever stop and just let yourself process life today and how insanely messed up this year has been? I have once or twice and it results in a facial waterfall.

All the stresses and the mini-battles (keeping working, the bloody masks, not letting the daily numbers get to you) and every other pitfall that’s dragged us down this year are enough to consume a person if they were to let it override life altogether.

Anger is what boils inside me the most and it’s getting borderline out of control. Like millions of other ‘keyboard warriors’ I have been saying way too much lately on social media, especially Facebook. I’ve let it get to me. Each morning, instead of praying, stretching and focusing firstly, I will be on my phone, eyeing the latest fear campaign Global news is spewing. And it will start to wind me up, before I’ve even stepped foot in the shower.

And multiple times a day I’m on there commenting or liking fellow commenters that share the same viewpoint as I. And I’m so tired of covid and some peoples respones where I’m name calling and swearing and yelling.. and for what! My calling in life isn’t to save the lost on social media and by the lost I mean those opposing my ‘side’. It is indeed time I remove that site from my life as of tomorrow night.

Ask me a few weeks ago about my thoughts on this coming new year and I would have been bleak, riffing on ‘just more of 2020’. Will something magically happen at the strike of midnight tomorrow night and all of our covid cares will be absolved? Of course not.

Ask me tonight and I will talk of hope. Without it we are completely doomed and left in morbid darkness. Just like you, I don’t know what’s around the corner but I have both working faith and hope that our circumstances will improve. Not over night but soon enough.

The world doesn’t need me cramming my view of masks down its throat and neither do you. What we need is a shared sense of hope and words of encouragement and life. I’m pushing down the heads of those who are already drowning by engaging in verbal battles on social media when they need lifting up, as do I by them and you, my friends.

So as the year after 2019 breaks lose and begins to drift away as only a memory, look to the present and future with hope. This right now is not our new normal. Soon enough we will talk about it in terms of “can you believe we had to cover our faces?” Or “remember the Christmas we weren’t allowed to spend with family?” The truth will come to light and no matter what that means we will have a new day at hand. And for that we will verbalize our thanksgiving on a daily basis will visible smiles on all our faces.