The Year of Everyday Awe

How Awe and Memory Shape the Threshold of a New Year

I’ll confess: I’m a lover of New Years. There is something so tender about this strange hovering space—this in-between—where the world stills just long enough for us to hold the past and the future in our hands at once. In this pause, I sit with what has been: the joy that anchored me, the ache that stretched me, the labor that left me bone-weary, and the small, quiet wonders that found me when I wasn’t looking. Here, in this stillness, I am granted the grace to name what was not right—the things I clung to when I should’ve let go—and to imagine what might yet be.

Our family has decided to lean into wonder this year. Not the kind that demands mountaintops and grand horizons, but the awe that stirs in the everyday. On Christmas morning, I caught a glimpse of it: my child, wrapped in sparkles and a tutu, pouring all her delight into building a sandcastle. In her simple contentment, I recognized it—awe. Dacher Keltner describes awe as the feeling of being in the presence of something vast, something that transcends our understanding of the world. It is not always loud or overwhelming; sometimes, it arrives quietly, in the form of a child playing on the porch.

On New Year’s Eve, we took our family to a countdown-to-noon dance party. The room was alive with children, twirling and leaping without a care. My husband turned to me and said, “I just experienced it.” And I knew exactly what he meant. Watching children dance—their bodies moving freely, with no thought of form or correctness, only the unfiltered joy of the music—it does something to you. It reminds you of the beauty that exists beyond perfection, beyond worry, beyond self-consciousness.

Since late December, we’ve been keeping a list, jotting down these fleeting moments of wonder. Adding to it feels like an act of resistance. These small pauses, these seconds that break the ceaseless rhythm of empire, are sacred disruptions. They slow the rush to produce and achieve, inviting us to reflect instead on what has formed us. In these moments, we strip away the stories the world has written for us and ask what is true, what is sacred, what is ours to carry forward into this new time.

I think of the Israelites standing on the edge of the Jordan River, caught between the wilderness and the promise. In Deuteronomy, God tells them to remember: remember how you were delivered, remember who you are. But God also warns them of the danger of forgetting when they cross over. That liminal space, that threshold, was holy ground—a place for remembering and unlearning, for releasing what empire had planted in them and holding fast to what was holy.

It was also a space to revel in the awe—the awe of what they had experienced: the miracles; the sea splitting, the pillar of cloud and fire, the bread falling from the sky. I wonder if they kept a list.

As I step into this new year, I find myself asking: what empires have I unknowingly built within myself that dull my wonder? What structures of perfectionism, self-reliance, or despair have I constructed, brick by brick? And what might it look like to deconstruct them? To lean into the freedom of this threshold and allow myself to be shaped by something truer, something deeper? Perhaps the new year is less about resolutions and more about remembering who I was before the world told me otherwise.

In this liminal space, I sense God’s whisper: “I am making all things new.” But it is not the newness of conquest, of more, of accumulation—not the kind that tears down and exasperates. It is the newness of liberation, the tender renewal that begins not with force, but with care. And perhaps, this year, that renewal begins with me.

So I hold this moment, this hovering space, as a gift. A chance to breathe, to reflect, to remember. To name what I have carried and discern what I will leave behind. And as I move forward, I pray for the courage to dwell in awe—not just in the grandeur of mountains or the vastness of oceans, but in the everyday wonders that whisper of a God of abundance.

And in this dwelling, I dance—uninhibited, wild, and free. Like children. Like Miriam after the miracle at the sea.