I was baptized somewhere in my early teens. If I had to guess, I was somewhere in between 12 and 14. If you ask my mom, she probably remembers for sure. I don’t know if it’s the pregnancy brain, or that it happened so long ago, but there aren’t too many details I remember of that day. I remember I was baptized with two of my childhood church friends. I remember the water was warm. I remember that I didn’t want to say anything into the microphone to the congregation watching. When I emerged, my dad was on the other side of the baptismal with a towel and one of the biggest smiles on his face.

From the moment I was allowed to sign up for classes for my junior year of high school, there was one class that I was dying to take: photography. Little did I know, as I sat down on my first day, that I was about to learn an art that took a whole lot more work than the point-and-click photography I was accustomed to. Oh, no. This photography class dealt solely in film. We learned every step of creating a photo, leading up to the ever-exciting experience of using a dark room.

Trusting in the Lord is something I’m not quite sure we’re ever done learning, and the odds are, you don’t quite realize just how much you don’t trust in the Lord until someone points out how blatantly independent you are from the Lord. But this weekend, I was listening to someone else’s testimony about how the Lord used a season of poverty to teach him dependence on the Lord, and he said something that hit me right between the eyes.

What is the first thing you think when you walk into the gym? Is it “I’m incapable,” or “I’m not fit at all compared to all these other people?” Do you compare yourself to everyone else in the room or feed yourself unmotivating lies? The same exhaustion and self-deprecation that follow us around in life tends to follow us into the gym too, and most times, they tend to scream even louder. The enemy loves to get ahold of our insecurities and inflate them like a balloon as he sees us struggle, being afraid of the gym doors or the thought of even stepping on a treadmill. These are moments that the devil lives for, but also moments that do not have to be our reality.

No matter how long you’ve been a Christian– whether you’re on day one or decades from the starting line– everyone that has ever followed Jesus is unified by at least this fact: none of us have ever graduated from the point of salvation. Because no matter how long your spiritual resume is, it is unavoidable that you will struggle with your own tendency towards sin until the day you die. Maybe that’s blunt or depressing, but it’s true. There will never be a point in this life where you will be able to think, “Well, that’s it. I’ve done it. I’ve obtained a wholly righteous and upright lifestyle. I will no longer struggle with sin.”

This is how I want to start this year: my heart for us all! As everyone starts posting their visions, power words, and resolutions for the new year, let me take this moment to encourage you– and encourage myself in the process. I’m one of those people who loves and hates to set goals. Big-picture stuff overwhelms me. So when I set a goal for myself, my perfectionist attitude steps in and starts to discourage me. The funny thing is, I’ve started to notice that I’m not alone. There are so many people I find around me that are unafraid to dream dreams.

The Three Kings. The Magi. More commonly known as the Wise Men. Which begs the question: what makes them wise? It could be their academic prowess. It could be their ability to study the stars and ancient texts in a world where science and technology were beyond most people’s understanding. For me, there are two things that are readily apparent as I read through the beginning verses of Matthew 2. The first is that the Wise Men were sensitive to the Holy Spirit. They saw a brand new star appear in the sky and immediately knew that this star was the sign of Jesus’ birth.

If you’ve ever seen a picture of Cape Town, chances are you’ve noticed Table Mountain, a gigantic, flat-topped mountain that provides the backdrop to hands-down my favorite city on the planet. Back in 2015, I was living, going to school, and serving on a missions trip in the mother city, when my mom and grandma surprised me with a 10-day visit. By that time, I had been there for months, and I had climbed other mountains, but I hadn’t yet gone to the summit of one of the seven natural wonders of this world.