Can I make a confession?
When I turned 24, for the first time I felt disappointed leading up to my birthday. It turns out, it is actually pretty common to feel this way and known as the "birthday blues." Sometimes it's because what your life looks like doesn't meet your expectations, or others expectations for you. For me personally, I was disappointed to be turning another year older and my life didn't look anything like I thought it would.
Have you ever reached a certain age or milestone, and felt like you were too late?
I felt like I had reached a deadline kind of like that feeling when it's finals week in college and you're walking in to take your test knowingly unprepared with that pit in your stomach.
But you can't change the time of the test, you can't go back and study more, you're here and all you can do is sit down and write an essay with as many general phrases as possible praying your professor doesn't notice.
Maybe, 2020 has kind of felt like that.
As the year winds down, a lot of us are hopeful and excited as we look to 2021, but we also might be a little frustrated with how 2020 turned out. We are at that milestone, and things might not look like what we had hoped for.
If you're a resolution maker or a goal setter, or if you just have a dream on your heart and you're frustrated and disappointed with how 2020 turned out, this is for you.
God's promises don't expire.
God is and was and is to come. He is outside of time. He can work a miracle in a moment. We should be faithful to steward our time and diligent to use it wisely, but ultimately God is in control.
If you had a dream for 2020 that didn't come to pass, don't brush off that dream or promise and assume you heard God wrong because you don't see it yet.
Instead, press in. Maybe 2020 was the year God imparted the dream in you, and it might take longer to come to fruition.
Don't believe the lie that as the year ends, so do the hopes and dreams you had for it when you were dreaming fresh dreams and hopeful for the future with God last year in January.
His promise doesn't expire. Everything can change in a brief moment, be ready when it does.