2026: The Year I Didn’t Plan For

Wednesday, 21 January 2026

A few months ago a single phone call – the kind that sucks the air from your lungs and cleaves your life into a before and an after – turned the “year ahead” into a landscape I no longer recognise. In an instant, and with a knockout punch I’m still reeling from, our lives were irrevocably changed.

Within about six weeks the year ahead went from casually expecting more of the usual: time with grandkids, weekends away, gigs, late nights with good friends; to finding ourselves in a strange new world. My calendar, once marked with coffee dates and brow appointments, is now a sea of medical appointments.

This sojourner life just got real.

I find myself in yet another iteration of the in-between: a strange, holy, and mentally exhausting place. Living in the space between the life I expected and the reality of an unimaginable something else, between the life the people I care about themselves counted on and the road they’re now being forced to walk. It’s navigating a new language of medical terminology and endless hours in waiting rooms that feel more foreign than any place I’ve ever visited.

I had a vision for 2026. A little blurry with some parts to be fleshed out, but I thought I knew what to expect. It was going to be the year of rest, faith and family interspersed with travel, the occasional diary entry. I’m now realising that the most important things I’ll do this year won’t be at work or on my laptop. God is calling me to answer Him in the quiet, repetitive, and often invisible work of tending to someone else’s needs.

I know that God will help me to find strength in the detour.

Despite it all I don’t see this coming year as “lost” in any way. As I reflect on the Gospel, I realise that John the Baptist didn’t choose his desert; he just occupied it with intention. In the stillness of it all, the noise of the world fades away. You realise that “living with purpose” isn’t about the grand ambitions we pursue with earnestness; it’s about the small, sacrificial acts of love that no one sees but God.

And despite the foreignness of where we find ourselves as opposed to the lives we had before that phone call, my faith and trust in God have carried me through, and continues to hold me up when it all gets heavy. I make the most of quiet days now, I don’t try to keep quite so busy.

The terrain of 2026 has shifted to a steeper, rockier climb than what I had imagined. But we’re far from lost, we’re just on a different road.

And the Good Shepherd is on it with us.