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

This week, Dan invites us to look back at 2016 and reflect on everything the year has held,

both the highs and lows, the glory, and the heartache. After offering a few categories to guide us in this reflection, Dan shares from his own process

of looking at the themes of the past year, wondering how particular moments and experiences

shape the person he is becoming.

We have come to the end of a year.

And what I'd like to do is to reflect with you about how to end the year due to the fate of timing.

I believe this podcast will be arriving somewhere on the 31st.

So the prospect of you actually engaging this a week or so before, that would have been more desirable.

I doubt if this arrives in your end basket in, let's just say, the early portion of the day,

with the anticipation of your evening's activities and the slide

into the new year, talk it away. One does not need to end the year exactly on a week before

or the day of. In some ways, ending the year, I believe, is a process of reflection over what you have

engaged, what you have learned, what has worked, what has not worked, what the year has

held for you.

Because the following week, we're going to be talking about what it means to actually

ponder, pray in, and engage what this

next year holds for you. But in some ways, the obvious implication is, I don't think you can

actually begin unless you end. And the way you end, how well you end, will determine something

of the prospect of your ability

to really enter well into what it is that you wish, God wishes, on your behalf.

So the purpose of walking through a year, I think is in many ways to walk through the debris

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