I picked the word “Desire” as my 2024 word of the year.

It proved to be tough word, but a one that stuck with me more often than it floated off like past years.

I didn’t indulge every desire. In fact, more of my effort was spent trying to identify my desires than making them come to pass. It’s hard work for an enneagram 9.

Paying attention to my desires is a gift I haven’t given myself for decades. I used to think this was very pious of myself. I wore it like a badge of honor.

“Oh don’t worry about me!” “I’m good with whatever!” “I’m flexible!”

All of these things are true about me. But I have also spent a lot of my life robbing myself of the very human and fulfilling experience of wanting anything out of my life.

When I hit publish on my last article about outrage, I knew there would be more to say here. Mostly because the deep truth is that anger isn’t inherently evil or even altogether bad for you.

Anger is simply an emotion on the emotions chart. It’s one that we feel deep in our bellies, running hot across our foreheads, sending tremors through our fingers.

Anger is not the problem at all. In fact, anger - when properly synthesized - can become a great motivator for change in life, and history has proven this to be true more than once.

Is it just me or are we all yelling on the internet these days?

I’m in the business of wholeness. This means unearthing and calling out what it is that fractures us and suggesting ways we might move forward in healing.

My friend, outrage is fracturing you and it’s fracturing us.

Let's talk about how to move away from outrage addiction.

I visited the National Museum of African American History & Culture in DC last Sunday morning. We skipped our regular church service and caught a train to DC with my family and brother to meet my sister-in-law who was leading a band trip there. So I can’t claim that it was my idea.

We had missed church service the weekend before as well and my inner church girl who owned several Sunday school perfect attendance airbrushed tee shirts was fighting me about missing church again.

Little did I know how much that visit would be a Divine encounter in and of itself.

I love when things are obvious.

That means there’s an obvious solution - even if it’s a painful one like the tonsillectomy in my son’s future.

An obvious problem is a fixable problem.

But - the big *but* - not all problems are obvious.

I used to think faith was something to be grasped.

In fact, I've been in a lot of conversations committed to "putting handles" on a faith concept - bless it. It's from a good place that we want to make the concepts of a faith from an ancient origin easily applicable to our 21st-century lives. But I'm not sure grasping it should be the goal anymore.

At this point many of us have faced advocacy burnout as bad news keeps coming one wave after another after another. Before I go on, know I believe deeply in fighting for change where we want to see it, and my purpose here is to make sure that you're up to the task as the most whole version of yourself.

I freaking love watching my kids, they teach me so much. My favorite thing to watch is when they are discovering something new and amazing. This happens at lot at the Science Center or the Aquarium. They are face to face with something so new and wild that their brains have never imagined before. Their eyes move over their new discovery a million times as they compute what it is they are seeing. Their faces are a combination of peace and amazement. They are unthreatened by the fact that their smallness has never anticipated such a thing, they are grateful to be there discovering this new thing in that moment. Their wonder is often followed up with "Mommy, look at this!" an invitation into the wonder they are experiencing. And I always join. I LOVE IT. This year, I'm joining my kids in the hunt for awe-filled wonder and I hope to invite them into my own discoveries, too.

2022 was a good year for me. It also held a new kind of difficult. The "ands" of 2022 feel very strong, really.

In 2022, I got to spend a whole year living into my values in a new way. I got to step into a full year of doing this new thing and establishing the rhythm of life for my family I spent so long craving.

This new working pace destroyed my expectations of what good productivity should look like. In fact, this year I got the wild wake up call that productivity has been quite the idol in my life and so I spent a lot of time dethroning it. And the work of dethroning productivity, and de-commodifying my very self has resulted in a wildly different list of things I'm proud of this year than I would have anticipated or imagined in January 2022…

I start out every new year with a birthday. Just 5 days into a new year, the number that defines my time here on earth goes up. Honestly, it doesn't really feel like the new year begins until after my birthday. I don't like to go back to work before then. I don't tend to try to start resolutions before then. I just give myself the birthday gift of an extra 5 days of rest and celebration.

I also tend to do a lot of reflecting on those days. Reflection - in a more honest sense, often ruminating, comes pretty naturally to me. I love the movie Inside Out because I can remember, in my own maturing, when my islands of personality fell and were rebuilt. And I take notice of my islands of personality crashing within me even today.

My 33rd year held a lot of crashing and rebuilding.

It was 2019 and I had gotten back into regular counseling. The day's topic was the miscarriage I had recently experienced, and further processing of the sudden death of my cousin's husband a few months prior. I was choking back tears (because even in counseling then, I didn't feel permission to cry) and told her…