Greetings in the name of our Savior, Jesus Christ, who is, and was, and is to come. I hope the Year of our Lord 2025 is off to a good start for you. We are eighteen days in and as I scan the list of appointments, local church and missional agency visits, and preaching engagements already on my calendar I am inspired as ever to be the President/CEO of the United Methodist Foundation and Development Fund for the Tennessee-Western Kentucky Conference.

As I continue to live into the various opportunities and aspects of my work, I am discovering that some of the greatest gifts our Foundation and Development Fund can offer aren’t found in the numbers on a ledger sheet, a loan statement, or an investment report. They are needs of the heart and soul…healing and hope.

On more than one occasion in meeting with the leadership of a faith community or mission house, the feelings expressed echo a desire for curative action from woundedness allied to a realistic objective that generates positive, forward-facing energy. In many of these encounters, healing and hope are used to express what people are looking for, in need of, or wondering where one or both can be found? If I do not hear and acknowledge these needs, it means I am not sharing in their distress…and if I am sharing in their distress, I am not offering the empathy of Christ.

In these moments I am reminded that the church, when it’s at its best, is focused on addressing these basic human yearnings. Sure, evaluating financial health can be a sharing in a source of distress, but money isn’t always the best place from which to generate a sense of spiritual renewal, regeneration, and rejuvenation. Even as I continue to adjust to and more confidently claim the expectations and responsibilities of the position I now occupy, my sense of identity, confidence, and purpose do not come from current interest rates or market performance. Those are too unpredictable and uncontrollable. To generate the energy necessary to offer healing and hope, we all need to use these early days of 2025 to be motivated by the One True Source of healing and hope…Jesus Christ.

If you go back to the opening line of this devotional, I used a phrase from Revelation 1:8 which reads,
“‘I am the Alpha and the Omega’, says the Lord God, who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty.”(NRSV) I have claimed the latter part of this verse to use in a variety of ways in 2025…as part of a greeting or introduction, as a personal breath prayer, or as a touchstone of countenance that connects me to our eternal source of strength. From that reality, I am able to attempt to share in the distress of others.

In Philippians 4, the Apostle Paul writes, “I know what it is to have little, and I know what it is to have plenty. In any and all circumstances I have learned the secret of being well-fed and of going hungry, of having plenty and of being in need. I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me. In any case, it was kind of you to share in my distress.”(NRSV)

There is no way any person of faith can confidently step into their day, their moment, their encounter with a neighbor in need without being linked to the everlasting Lord of all Healing and Hope. The markets will rise and fall…interest rates will be high and low…but the Sovereign-steadfastness of the Lord will stand forever. In that, may we find our healing and hope.

Serving Christ, serving you,