Prayers for 2025
It is my 70th time to usher in a new year. For the early part of my life, it was just another date, punctuated by fireworks and parties. Later, it was a time to share with other couples, celebrating our growing families and burgeoning careers.
New Year’s Eve has brought black tie dinners, old time orchestras, and the sound of champaign corks popping. It has also brought bonfires, Brunswick stew and Apalachicola Bay oysters.
Occasionally, we ushered in a new year while enjoying a New Year’s Bowl game in various cities, though it has been a while for my team to enjoy that honor.
For the past 14 years I have written an article detailing the resolutions I kept and those I planned to make in the coming year. This year, I am finding myself leaning in another direction.
After looking back at past promises, I realized that I kept perhaps half of them. Some resolutions never got out of the starting gate. Others made it part of the way towards the goal, before running into the complicated thing we call life. In some ways, it was always a report card in my life during the past years. Maybe this year calls for a change.
2024 was a year with extraordinary memories for my family. Mary Lou and I checked off a bucket list item when we traveled to Antarctica. It is unlikely that we will ever go back, but it is also equally unlikely that we will ever travel to a more amazing place in our lifetime.
We were blessed to take all our children and grandchildren on an adventure to Cowboy Country. Following the path of a trip I took with my own grandparents just over 55 years ago, we visited the Grand Tetons, Jackson Hole, Yellowstone, Cody, Sturgis, and Mount Rushmore. We rode horses and rafted down rivers while seeing amazing wildlife. America the Beautiful at its grandest.
2024 saw us make new friends and enjoy old friends. We enjoyed the theater, more sporting events than we can count, and came to love even more the opportunities that come with living in a college town.
My 1886 Steinway piano was finally restored back to its original condition after a two-year effort that was not without its own trials. It has been a joy to hear its sweet tone just as I remembered. I am not a musician worthy of this work of art, but it makes me feel grand, humble, reflective, and thankful. The completion of this project is one of the highlights of my year.
For the first time in a decade and a half, my new year article will not list any resolutions. I am learning to coast in life, embracing retirement, enjoying my go-go years with my wife. The go-slow years will come soon enough, and the no-go years will hopefully be way off in the future.
In the meantime, I have been thinking about prayer a good bit more than usual. I have prayers for our nation during very turbulent and challenging times. I have prayers for those who are suffering from any number of illnesses and challenges. Those who find it hard to put food on the table for their family. Those with health issues. Those who have lost loved ones or ache from the pain of divided families. Those who are lonely and those that are lost.
At the end of 2024, two days before Christmas, I found myself praying the most unusual prayer of my life. My mother, Jobie Ponder, had earlier been diagnosed with colon cancer. While the removal of the tumor was successful, subsequent tests indicated that chemotherapy was required. That is not an easy thing to undertake for someone approaching their 93rd birthday.
Her surgeon and oncologist both agreed that immunotherapy was the best course of action in her case. Unfortunately, that protocol is only available in a clinical trial and requires that a person has more than one type of cancer to be eligible.
So, on December 23rd, as my mother began her PET scan, I prayed that they would find more cancer in my mother. Not a lot, and hopefully not any worse than what she already had. It seemed like such an outrageous prayer in a world filled with so much need.
The scan showed that she had cancer in two lymph nodes that had previously been undetected. Last Friday, she was accepted into the clinical trials at Emory. She will have her first infusion this afternoon.
The most unusual prayer I have ever made in my life was answered. Her journey is not over and 2025 will certainly bring the need to lift more prayers on her behalf, but the path forward is clear.
I share my mother’s journey with her blessing. She is aware of those lifting her up. She has been touched by the words of encouragement from people she does not even know. She has been steadied and nurtured by her many friends. This is her way of offering thanks.
As we face 2025, I welcome the calm that I feel on these turbulent seas. Some of the resolutions I made in the past seem somewhat shallow and trivial. We face challenging times for sure, but I am comforted by knowing that God does indeed answer prayer, no matter how seemingly outlandish that prayer may be.
o0o
Dan Ponder can be reached at [email protected]