Attend: Walking at the Pace of Love

I ended 2025 as I have ended nearly every year for the last decade, save the two Decembers we lived in Bangladesh, at the Monastery of the Holy Spirit.

The place itself has become part of my prayer. The towering white concrete columns rise like sentinels of silence. The wooden beams stretch overhead, an ark, a cradle, holding me. Blue and purple light spills through stained glass, and Mary and Jesus look back at me from the rose window, steady and familiar witnesses to this liminal space between years. I come here not to make plans, but to listen, to let the year loosen its grip and the next one approach without demand.

A Year That Was Hard and Holy

This year, as I sat in the same pews, I reread the words I had written in this place one year ago. I could hear it immediately: the strain beneath the sentences. I was in a dark place, full of worry, grasping for certainty, bracing myself against an unknown future. I was only weeks away from an anxiety swell that would take me out for days and take months to rebuild from. Reading those words now, I could see the rumblings of it already there—the fear, the vigilance, and the subtle desperation to manage what could not be managed.

How did I not see it coming? Or perhaps I did, but did not yet know how to stop grasping.

I opened my Illuminated Life workbook, the same one I have written in every year in this abbey, and began to record the highs and lows of 2025. And as I wrote, something surprised me. My heart felt a thousand times lighter than it had felt in these same pews a year ago. The year had been hard and holy. There had been growth and grief, rupture and repair. But there had also been deep healing. God had met me again and again—sometimes gently, sometimes insistently—and taught me things I did not know I could learn.

I could have stayed there all day, simply saying thank you. And yet, there is more to come.

Crossing into What Is Becoming

I enter 2026 expecting transition. This will be the end of my time at the communities I currently call home, which is the reality of a life in ministry, always on the move. This year will mark the end of a discernment process that began more than five years ago, when I first stepped onto the long road of seminary, internships, formation, training. In these full and busy years, I have been learning to hear, to accept, and finally to inhabit my calling. This will be the year I become what I will forevermore be: a priest.

It will also be the year I have two children in high school; the year my firstborn begins her final lap through those halls. It will be a year of change and newness, of thresholds crossed and identities settled into more deeply. And with that, inevitably, will come both joy and ache, courage and fatigue.

What I want, more than anything, is to live this year awake. I want presence. Joy. Awe. Community. Strength and bravery—not the loud kind, but the kind that does not flinch when the ground shifts. I want to release whatever illusions of control I am still clinging to, whatever fear and worry try to disguise themselves as responsibility.

A Lantern for the Next Step

I arrived at the monastery the morning of December 30 with no idea what my word for the coming year would be but believing God would, as God has for years now, reveal one to me. As I prayed, images began to rise unbidden: a lantern casting just enough light for the next step. Hands linked as I walked with others down a narrow path. A lamp carried at twilight—not a floodlight, not certainty, just enough. Scripture echoed quietly in my heart: Your word is a lamp to my feet. My grace is sufficient for you. Encourage one another and build each other up.

I thought of the communities that had carried me this year when my legs were weary, of the people who had walked hand in hand with me through a season that asked more of me than I thought I had to give. And slowly, without drama, the word settled in.

Attend.

It is a quieter word than some I’ve carried before, but it is strong. It comes from attendere—to stretch toward, to give ear, to be present with intention. To attend is not to hurry or to perform. It is to show up without grasping. To listen before fixing. To walk at the pace of love.

Attend resists fear by narrowing the field to this moment. It refuses the tyranny of the imagined future. It trusts that God is already here.

Learning What It Means to Attend

As a daughter of God, Attend invites me to be beloved before being useful—to receive God’s gaze without flinching, without auditioning. When fear rises, the question becomes gentler: What is God attending to in me right now?

As a daughter, a sister, a wife a friend, Attend asks me to listen without anticipating, managing, or correcting—to walk beside rather than ahead, to notice tone and tenderness, weariness and hope.

As a mother, Attend shifts my gaze from who my children might become to who they already are becoming. It reminds me that presence creates safety, and safety allows strength to grow. My prayer is simple: may my children feel seen more than steered.

As a pastoral care giver and chaplain, Attend creates spaciousness. Silence becomes welcome instead of awkward. Conversations are allowed to breathe. Attention itself becomes a form of love.

And as a deacon and, God, willing, this year, a priest—Attend names my truest work. It is to hold the lamp, not control the path. It is to listen for where God is already moving in others and ask to join that work. It is to trust the Spirit more than my own competence. I am not required to be luminous, only faithful.

Fear, I am learning, shrinks time into the future. Attending returns me to now. When worry arises, I want to practice naming it gently and asking a single clarifying question: What is mine to attend to in this moment? The rest I release back into God’s care.

I imagine myself at the end of this year—not having arrived, not having mastered anything—but having learned how to walk in the light that God gives for just the next step. I hope I learn how to welcome what is given rather than grasp for what is hidden.

So this is the simple rule I carry into the year ahead: Attend to God. Attend to the one before me. Attend to the light given. Release the rest.