The Year 2025

photo from Pinterest!

The last time I posted on this blog was about 6 months ago. I had just turned 22 and all I could think of was coming back to write consistently because I had taken the time off to prepare for my exams earlier in the year. Little did I know that that was the only post I was going to release last year. I wrote a piece about hope but I had written that way before I posted it so I only ever wrote one piece.

How humbling that is to think about. Most times, when we enter a new year, there’s the urge and hope to do better than you did the previous year. I entered 2025 with a resolve to take a break from everything until I was done with my exams and then had big goals for the rest of the year because I wasn’t going to be writing any more major exams till this year. Some of those goals did end up being accomplished. I republished Redeemed (in case you were not aware), started a YouTube channel, and I resumed clinicals but these were the highlights of my year.

I thought of coming back like I never disappeared from this platform, but that would have been unfair to you and me both.

Last year was rough.

I was reading a book at the end of 2025 and the book asked me to describe my year in one word. I wrote down trying. It was the only thing I could think of.

The only year I could think to compare 2025 to was 2021 and that's for reasons I’d best not describe at the moment. This is not to say that 2025 didn’t have good parts and I hate that I have to put this disclaimer; we now live in a world where everyone has to put disclaimers before saying anything because of fear of being perceived wrongly. I don’t know or think that I want to subscribe to that because it places limitations on one’s expressivity. The one who would understand would.

For so much of the year, I had lived in what some would call survival mode, and in those days all I could think of was how I wanted a friend, needed a friend even who I didn’t have to say anything to and they would understand.

I will admit, I forgot that Jesus was my friend. I talked to Him here and there, but I got tired of talking and at some point, relationship with Him became routine. It became the thing that I longed for, but didn’t want to participate in because going to God was a reminder of everything that was going wrong at the time. I wondered how I could simultaneously be living for Him and He’d allow certain things to happen at the time. It's a reality that Christians face at some point in their journey with God.

I saw myself as Job(which was quite dramatic by the way); I knew I couldn’t relate to him on all the things he went through but I found comfort in reading about his dynamic with God because it soothed something inside of me. I wasn't alone and I didn’t feel like a truant anymore.

Now, writing this, I’m wondering what God saw in me at the time. What did he think of me? Was He tired of all my tears?

These are the parts of me that most times, I tend to bury, hiding out of fear that God doesn’t understand or that if I am not grateful, something worse would happen (I was in the phase were it felt like the more I ran to God, the worser things became).

By the time the year came to an end, I was ready for it to be over with but I didn’t have the energy; the mental capacity to have hope for 2026. I was like, “What if God redirects my steps after I make my plans again?” I didn’t want to go through 2025 anymore, I was tired.

That was until I came back to one of the core principles of my faith: GRATITUDE.

The thing with gratitude is that you can be thanking God with your lips but your heart is far away from Him. Of my own volition, thanking God was hard and I didn’t want to do something with my lips that wasn’t burning in m heart. I felt like a fraud.

One day though, I think it was the same book I was reading and the author talked about gratitude and being grateful for the good things that happened in 2025. I got thinking. The first thing I was and am still grateful for was that I was still alive and was healthy.

2025 didn’t take me. The more I sat in that, the more I realized that even with all the tears, the periods of silence between me and God, the “will this come to an end?” God didn’t let me go and He didn’t let any of my people go. I found that gratitude starting welling up in my heart.

I became grateful for God’s voce leading me at the beginning of the year and Him hearing my prayers and answering them; I passed my 2nd MBBS, that wasn’t something to take lightly and let me just say that that exams I couldn’t have passed by my strength, it just wouldn’t have been possible. The miracles that surrounded that exams for me, nothing can convince me that God isn’t present and He doesn’t hear.

Then came writing and the number of times my laptop gave me problems (and still gives me till this day) but with all that, He helped me write and publish Redeemed in the timeline He had given me. Mind you, when He told me to release it on the 24th of September, everything in me rebelled. I was like, “Isn’t that too far? I’ve already been working on this book for a long time, I want to get it over with.” In my human mind, I couldn’t see then that God already knew what 2025 held and He knew that with the chaos, I needed as much time as He could give me.

Then, I moved. The issues surrounding this one made me cry in front of my parents. Mind you, I never do that; I like to be by myself when it’s time to let it all go but that day I started talking to them and before you know it, tears started falling down my eyes and I keep telling them, “I’m tired, I’m just tired.” It wasn’t a physical tiredness, it was a mental thing. I was wondering how many more things needed to go wrong before I was given a green check mark. Of course my dad was like, “Disappointments are part of life, you can’t escape them.” In my head, I thought, “I never want this kind of disappointment in my life again.”

The chaos of publishing came but by the time I saw the physical copy of my book, it felt like everything was finally coming together. Publishing was another reason to be grateful and it was a very humbling experience. It reminded me of what obedience looked like and how people whether you see it or not, whether you accept it or not are tied to what has God placed o the inside of you.

Sometimes, I had people write to me about Redeemed in a way that I had never seen it, write about God in ways that I hadn’t seen Him and I was tempted to reread it, I haven’t though because I don’t like going back to read what I’ve written. I already did that abut a hundred times during the editing process. 😅

I could go on and on about the different things I could have been grateful for, but the most important thing that gratitude gave me was a change of perspective. It aligned my heart back to the goodness of God. Christianity is not a guarantee that things will go smoothly or easier for you, it might even be the opposite because you might be thinking, ‘I have God, the God of the entire universe. Why do I still have to go through this?’

It’s a thought process that I'm still taking my time to unlearn, but one thing I know for sure is that Christianity is a guarantee that everything will work together for my good (and yours). Not some things; ALL things.

Much love,

Uche 🤍

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I told myself that instead of wanting to do it all in a year, this time I’m going to take it slow or at least slower than I used to. I plan to post on here once a month. If you see more from me, praise God. Hopefully, you won’t see less than that.

Have a very very blessed year head and I pray that no matter what it is you went through last year or even if the year was a very good one for you, your perspective remains the one of Christ. See you next month.