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

This week, Dan reflects on 2015 and what it looks like to end the year well.

For most of us, reaching December 31st, feels like a marathon, and then we immediately start thinking about a new year.

So how do we pause and recognize

everything that that year is held, both the good and the bad? Dan shares his own experience

and offers some practical tips about learning to approach the end of the year with intentionality

and goodness. The last show of the year seems appropriate to have a focus on how to end the year.

Well, the task at hand is one that I confess I have rarely done as I could or should in a way that would profit my heart as I look back over a year.

I think my tendency, like many, is to acknowledge it was a good year, a hard year, a year that

could have been better, could have been worse. All right, let's go.

Let's get into the new year, especially as an academic. It is so easy with the last several weeks

of December spent grading to finally get to that spot around Christmas where I am done,

usually done with a long year of travel, done with a year of grading, done, and now it's time

at least for six, seven, eight days just to vegetate. And the idea of actually

using some of that time to end the year well, and then the next podcast will be on how to begin

the year well. That just feels like, for the most part, I don't want to do it. I'll spend a

bit of time on it, but I'm not going to spend concentrated time on it, because it's just too much.

Frankly, it's almost too wearying, in some ways painful, and almost pointless to look back over a year.

It's over, let's get forward.

But I think in many ways that has left me, for one, not as grateful as I wish to be.

And second, not really prepared to do the work of consent. as grateful as I wish to be.

And second, not really prepared to do the work of considering what the new year holds.

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