Assumed audience: People who like reading year-in-review summaries. (I always assume that’s mostly just me, a few years in the future!)
A bit of context: For many years now, I have made it my habit to write up one of these summaries. In this case, I have tried to make it a bit more digestible by breaking into smaller chunks. All of the posts are available at the 2025 in Review series page.
Most of life has been fairly ordinary this year, though “ordinary” by no means dull or uninteresting. Quite the contrary: with an 8th grader and a 6th grader, our lives are quite full, and full mostly of joy — though I do not always remember that on the days when parenting is hard and tiresome, as inevitably it sometimes is. It is fun watching our little girls turn into young women, even as this transition comes with its own host of new complications and challenges. (Puberty and adolescence: what a ride! With only more to come!)
We continue to be grateful for dear friends in a healthy — imperfect, but healthy — congregation at Holy Trinity Anglican Church. Just this past Monday, we spent almost four hours out with some of our good friends celebrating Jaimie’s birthday, and it was sheer joy throughout. And as one of them commented afterward, we could have spent another six — we barely touched on so many good things! Good friendships like this are priceless, and the more so to me because I had spent so much of my adult life wondering if I would ever have them in person. Now we have many.
On a related note, this year we started hosting a monthly Happy Hour in our home, to which we have simply invited a bunch of friends and asked people to bring food or drink to share. We did not actually manage to host every month, but simply having it on the calendar meant that we did manage more months than not. More than that, knowing that we were doing it every month meant that missing one month was not the end of the world — whether because we had to cancel, as we did a couple of times, or because guests had to miss, as inevitably people did courtesy of schedule concepts. There’s always the next month!
In December, we went a step further and transformed it into a Fancy Christmas Party — with a dress code: ladies in cocktail dresses, men in at least slacks and a blazer. We said “black tie allowed but not required” (because I don’t have a tux; Jaimie has the appropriate getup and would have killed it, of course), and delightfully one of our friends did show up in a tux. Personally, I hope to have acquired a tux by next year just so I can host in it. The party was one of my favorite nights of the whole year and I cannot wait for it to go from “one-off” to “tradition”.
If you haven’t tried anything like this, you should: the Christmas party required a bit more preparation and cleanup, but the Happy Hour required relatively little and was never especially burdensome. “Have a bunch of friends over with good food and drink” is something our culture could use a lot more of — and used to do a lot more of.
Perhaps the most notable thing to me in this “everything else” bucket has been realizing the extent to which Jaimie and I are no longer the “young people” at church. One of our daughters is about to be in high school, for goodness’ sake: of course we are not the young people! Much as I commented about my role at Vanta, I am increasingly aware as I look around our church that increasingly it is our responsibility not only to participate in the life of the church but to lead.
Nothing brought this home to me more forcefully this year than having a few younger adults in the congregation very distinctly connect with Jaimie and me as an older couple in their lives. None of that was explicit, and as a result it actually took me a bit to recognize what I was seeing, but once I saw it, I could not un-see it. And of course that is true! A decade ago, we were looking at couples a decade ahead of us. The difference is that we’re now in our late 30s, so we can be the couple a decade ahead in life. It is a bit odd to consider that I am only 18 months away from being 40: as much as 30 seemed a big milestone, 40 seems a bigger one — well into middle adulthood.
In so many parts of life, no one really tells you these transitions are coming. We should, though! Again, as I said in the Professional update about the same dynamic in our careers, there is more to say here — I hope to write a little more about this in a dedicated post sometime soon.
In all these areas, though, I am glad to be able to say that we are doing well. Not every year have I been able to say that! But for 2025, I can.