Every new year comes with rituals that feel half serious, half desperate.
People eat twelve grapes under a table at midnight.
They throw water out the front door to “wash away” the old year.
They wear red underwear for love.
Gold for money.
They jump off chairs.
They avoid certain words.
They make wishes they refuse to say out loud, as if naming the fear would give it teeth.
We laugh at these traditions. But we keep them. [insert side-eye emoji]
Not because we really believe grapes can change our fate.
But because suffering scares us more than superstition ever could.
At the core of all of this is a quiet plea.
Let nothing hard touch me this year.
Let the grief miss my address.
Let the disappointment reroute itself to someone else.
Let me skip the parts that hurt.
I don’t want to be God’s strongest soldier this year.
And honestly, who wouldn’t want that.
Pain feels like failure.
Suffering feels like punishment.
We have been taught to see hardship as something to outgrow, bypass, “manifest” away, or spiritually reframe until it no longer inconveniences us.
But the Gospel tells a very different story.
Christianity does not offer a way around suffering.
It offers a way through it.
Jesus did not avoid pain.
He entered it fully.
Not as an accident. Not as a last resort.
But as the means by which redemption would come.
Jesus did not eat grapes under a table to ensure a smooth year.
He sweat blood in a garden and still walked forward.
That alone should reorient how we think about hardship.
Suffering is not evidence that God has abandoned us.
Often, it is the very place where He is closest.
The Gospel does not promise that we will be spared.
It promises that suffering will not be wasted.
Every year we try to trick our way into peace.
But peace has never come from avoidance.
It comes from trust. From endurance. From resurrection on the other side of what looked like the end.
The cross makes one thing clear.
Love does not eliminate pain.
It transforms it.
So maybe the question this year is not how to avoid suffering.
But whether we believe God can meet us in it.
Whether we trust that the hard things will not have the final word.
Whether we are willing to stop throwing water out the window and instead ask God to make us faithful in whatever comes through the door.
The resurrection did not come because the suffering was skipped.
It came because it was endured.
And that changes everything about how we walk into a new year.
