New Year Prayers for Whoever Isn't Ready to Make Resolutions

You didn't write a list this year. Maybe you tried, and the pen just sat there. Or maybe you know something specific about the twelve months ahead, a diagnosis still being worked out, a court date in March, an empty chair at Christmas dinner that will be there again, and "new year, new you" sounds like it was written for somebody else's life.

That's fine. You don't owe the calendar a resolution.

Resolutions assume a kind of year you might not be getting

Most New Year's prayers and most New Year's lists share an assumption: that the main thing standing between you and a better year is your own effort. Eat less, run more, call your mother, finally finish the thing. For a lot of people arriving here tonight, that isn't the obstacle. The obstacle is a layoff already announced for February. A biopsy result still pending. A divorce that becomes final sometime in the spring. A grief that didn't end when the obituary ran.

If that's closer to your year, the pressure to show up at January the first with goals and energy is its own weight on top of everything else. We're not against resolutions for the people who want them. But if you are not one of those people this year, you are not behind. You are being honest about where you actually are, which is a harder and better thing than a list.

Every season is a season, even the one you dread

There's an old piece of writing that doesn't try to talk you out of the hard season. It just names it, in the same breath as everything else.

For everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; a time to seek, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away; a time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak; a time to love, and a time to hate; a time for war, and a time for peace.

Ecclesiastes 3:1–8

This was written for people who had watched enough years go by to stop expecting a clean upward line. Notice what it doesn't do. It doesn't rank weeping below laughing, or mourning as the mistake and dancing as the goal. They're listed in the same breath, with no smaller font for the hard ones.

If the coming year is weighted toward a time to weep, or a time to mourn, or something that feels like a time for war in your own life, you are not failing a test and you have not been assigned a worse year because you lack faith. You are in a season, like every other one, and seasons move, even on the days you cannot feel them moving at all.

A prayer for the year you are dreading

This next one was sung by people walking an actual road, up into hill country, where bandits waited in the places you couldn't see around the bend.

I will lift up mine eyes unto the mountains: From whence shall my help come? My help cometh from Jehovah, Who made heaven and earth. He will not suffer thy foot to be moved: He that keepeth thee will not slumber. Behold, he that keepeth Israel Will neither slumber nor sleep. Jehovah is thy keeper: Jehovah is thy shade upon thy right hand. The sun shall not smite thee by day, Nor the moon by night. Jehovah will keep thee from all evil; He will keep thy soul. Jehovah will keep thy going out and thy coming in From this time forth and for evermore.

Psalm 121:1–8

It's a trail prayer, not a destination prayer. It was sung by people who had no idea what was around the next bend, and it does not pretend to know either. It doesn't say the road will be safe. It says the keeping does not depend on how alert you manage to stay.

If there is something specific you're afraid of this year, say it plainly instead of praying in generalities. Not "help me have a good year" but "I am afraid of what the scan will show" or "I don't know how I'll manage the first birthday without him." The prayer above isn't a guarantee that the thing you dread won't happen. It's a claim that whatever does happen, the watching over you isn't something you have to supply yourself.

When you didn't choose where you've landed

Some years you didn't pick. A diagnosis arrives, a marriage ends, a job disappears, and you find yourself somewhere you never would have chosen to be, for a length of time nobody can tell you.

There's a letter in the Bible written to people in exactly that position, people who had been taken from their homes to a city they hated, with no date for when they might leave.

Build ye houses, and dwell in them; and plant gardens, and eat the fruit of them. Take ye wives, and beget sons and daughters; and take wives for your sons, and give your daughters to husbands, that they may bear sons and daughters: and multiply ye there, and be not diminished. And seek the peace of the city whither I have caused you to be carried away captive, and pray unto Jehovah for it; for in the peace thereof shall ye have peace.

Jeremiah 29:4–7

This was a word to a whole community about a specific, decades-long exile. It isn't a verse to hand yourself as proof that your own particular plan will land on your own particular timetable. That's not what it was for, and using it that way does it a disservice. But the instruction underneath it still holds for a year you didn't choose: build something anyway. Plant something small anyway. Pray for the actual place you're in, not the year you wish you'd been given instead.

If this is a year you're dreading because of something that's already begun and isn't finishing on your schedule, you don't have to pretend it's a fresh start full of promise. You're allowed to simply keep living inside it, one ordinary house and one ordinary garden at a time.

A small way to pray tonight

You don't need a resolution tonight. One sentence will do. Name the actual thing, not the vague version. Not "help me be stronger" but "I am afraid of February" or "I don't know how to get through the first anniversary." Say it out loud or write it on paper, and let that be the whole prayer.

If you'd rather put words to a specific situation, you can start one at /pray, or look through other situations people have prayed through at /prayers. The list stays open all year, not just tonight.