Keep Pushing, Keep Working, Keep Hoping!
So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday,
ordinary life – your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life –
and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for God. Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture
that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God.
You’ll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what God wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you,
always dragging you down to its level of immaturity,
God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you.
– Romans 12:1-2
I always feel funny this time of year. On the one hand, it is the beginning of a new year. It is a great time to refocus and realign my life and work so that I pursue the things that I believe are important and true.
On the other hand, refocusing is hard. And I am tired. Also, I am still in the last throes of that post-holiday haze, and it is hard to get motivated. Also, I am self-centered. And have you watched the news lately? The world is going crazy, and people are divided, and why should I be realigning my life to do the most good when there is just so much that is wrong and backward in the world? Instead of jumping into 2026 strong, I often feel I can come up with a long list of reasons why I should just keep my head down and hope that the problems, hurts, and wrongs in this world will just be someone else’s problem.
If only there were a faithful way to be a holy slacker while the world stands in need. Lord, I am tired; can’t my calling just be to TAKE A NAP today?
Of course, I know better.
Thomas Merton wrote that, “Vocation does not come from a voice out there calling me to be something I am not. It comes from a voice in here calling me to be the person I was born to be.” In fact, we are all born to be servants, to attend to the wounds that exist in this world. If you are working and supporting McCurdy Ministries – and I know that you are – that means that you have experienced the realization that Merton is describing. You have sensed who you were born to be, and you were courageous enough to answer the call.
We need people who answer that call, particularly here in New Mexico. Time and again, we are told that New Mexico has problems. There is not a worse state in the union to be a child. Over 6,500 people will fall asleep tonight without a home (and it is going to be cold tonight). We are immersed in an explosive addiction crisis, and that addiction crisis masks deeper crises of mental health, social cohesion, poverty, spiritual bankruptcy, familial decline, and general hopelessness. All these problems are fixable but are currently getting worse, not better.
But together, we are taking our ordinary lives and presenting them as an offering to God, hoping and trusting that our shared work will make a difference. Even more, we are trusting that God will take all our shared effort and magnify it through the power of His grace and the hope that we share through Him.
What is more, working for peace, justice, and healing for those wounds, it turns out, is the best way to heal our own woundedness. That is what Paul is talking about in the Romans passage above. We do not settle for the world as it is, with all its pain. We fix our eyes on God as we serve. It makes all the difference.
So do not settle for the nap. Keep pushing, keep working, keep hoping. God is there in the struggle. Your work will change someone’s life today. It will. Someday, a person will tell their grandchildren about how you showed them the way when it seemed hopeless. God brings the best out of you.
Rev. Josh Kouri
McCurdy Ministries Board of Trustees
From Albuquerque, NM
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