You're listening to the Allender Center podcast with Dr. Dan Allender.

This week, Dan invites us to consider how to step into a new year with curiosity, intentionality, and faithfulness.

Dan recorded this episode from a hospital waiting room on Christmas

Day, a difficult circumstance, but one that allows a unique perspective about what it means to ask

what God has in store for us in the coming months. Well, happy New Year. I'm recording this podcast on Christmas morning. And I'm in the

Overlake Hospital in Bellevue, Washington. Not exactly the place that I anticipated

spending Christmas morning, let alone doing this podcast. What occurred was my daughter,

Annie, has been in an accident and has a collapsed lung, which for several days we were part of

the process of helping her, as her family had, it's too long a story, departed for Mexico,

and she was to join them, and this accident occurred and she's not able to fly.

Now, the process of being able to resuscitate a lung that was about 90% deflated

is a lot longer process, more convoluted, and in many ways, more disruptive than what I

understood. So we are on our fifth day in and out of the emergency room, and finally they hospitalized her to make sure that the lung was being properly addressed in the slow process.

But all that to say, the last few days have been ones of just intersecting between fear, intense, and then boredom that's a kind of lethargy of waiting,

constantly waiting for the next x-ray, waiting for a report back, waiting for a physician to visit to speak.

The whole process has been, if you've been in a hospital process, really, really long.

So that intersection of intense fear met with sort of that dull, distracted, disengagement.

It really, in some ways, provides a context for me to talk about how to anticipate what it

means to, in one sense, be part of planning the coming year.

So as I have been sitting for 12 to 14 hours a day in lobbies, emergency rooms, hospital rooms, you know, the thing that probably has become

clearer to me is the fact that the really three things I have found

productive in trying to engage a year that is just on the cusp, if not already arrived,

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