Looking ahead to the new year in those final weeks of 2024, I found myself laying the groundwork for what became something of a family social experiment. With sadness in my heart over what the new United States presidential administration in 2025 might inflict, my inner defense mechanisms began scheming ways to lighten the emotional load of the misery that likely lay ahead.
My first impulse was to lean as far as possible into a familiar stress-coping mechanism: flip open the (digital) calendar and start mapping out the year. We would anchor each month by intentionally engaging in some activity or pursuit that brought joy to our lives—as a family, as members of our community, as a married couple, and as individuals.
It wasn’t revolutionary, but my wife and I have learned the hard way that dwelling on the world’s awfulness and wishing for it to pass is a surefire way to miss the enjoyable parts of the present. No more wishing time away for us! Rather, we would engage time intentionally for joy and impact, leaving less of it to be consumed by doomscrolling and despair.
We plunged into the new year with our plan, and the joyful experiences quickly piled up. We spent more time with loved ones, ate more Saturday morning donuts, and saw more movies. We survived our first family escape room and attended the kids’ first “Weird Al” Yankovic concert. We took a road trip, visited museums, and learned about historical Americans. Writers’ circles, meditation groups, new hobbies, summer camp, game nights, and weekend getaways filled the calendar. And of course, we participated in monthly protests, equipped with snarky signs.
This list might seem exhausting. But I swear, it was refreshing, even life-giving. Our family has never been one to swamp our evenings and weekends with the stressful logistics of extracurricular activities. But what we seemed to achieve in 2025 was a year of cultivating moments, things to look forward to and enjoy. It was like the magic of the Christmas season but sustained and engineered for the whole family, not just the kids. This was infinitely better than a listless, excruciating year of being triggered and depressed while buffeted by bad news.
Sure, a fixation on planning for the future can result in a lack of being present to the current moment. And I’ll admit, that was part of the motivation behind this plan: to distract ourselves from misery. But existential anxiety and terror also take us out of the present moment, and violently so. As a family, we wanted not only to be more present in the current moment but to improve the odds that those moments offered experiences we actually wanted to be present in. It was a way to be agents of the joy that exists in this world.
As this unfolded, I wrestled a little with the concept of trusting God. Was I watching the annihilation of our government’s capacity to do good, while masked thugs terrorized communities, and saying, “Sorry, God, I don’t trust in your goodness and grace if we don’t ensure it ourselves”? But then it occurred to me: God gave us the agency to respond to the world in whatever way we like. Why not use it to create joy? I can worry about the world my children will inherit and also enjoy our time together now.
Margaret Pfeil of the South Bend Catholic Worker, in a beautiful talk, reflected on how Dorothy Day believed enjoyment of the material world can lead to a deeper mystical encounter with God. I might not usually picture the stern, gaunt founder of a movement defined by simple living as an advocate for material enjoyment. But Pfeil explained it’s about finding God’s grace in the individual moment and then letting that experience guide us—or even pull us—into a wider sense of awareness and gratitude for God.
A priest once told me that in scripture’s first beatitude, “poor in spirit” means those who realize we are dependent on God’s sustaining grace in every moment and therefore plead with God—like a poor beggar—for the grace we need, over and over. This is the present-tense relationship that God wants from us: one of trust, where we keep coming back with our needs because we know our lavishly loving God delights in meeting them. And therein lies the epiphany of this journey. Could it be that this was actually a year in pursuit of closer relationship with God, a transition from “in poor spirits” to “poor in spirit”?
I’ve been candid with God about my needs and motivations and have sought to respond with in-the-moment gratitude for the gifts that each family adventure has generated. Even if I find myself starting from a place of existential dread, of begging, “Please, God, no,” about some awful thing that has happened or might happen, I’m at least taking my problems to the right place, right now.
And as God lives in every person, that quest for closeness and relationality splashes onto my family’s relationship with our community and with each other. It’s not an escape from reality. It is, as Day realized, a closer, deeper, even augmented experience of relationship with reality.
Beyond the new places, encounters, and friendships, I’ve gotten new and graced glimpses of the personhoods of the people closest to me. I think of the emboldened look in my daughter’s eyes at the National First Ladies Museum in Canton, Ohio, as she watched a video on Eleanor Roosevelt’s overseas trips in support of the war effort; our 7-year-old’s triumph as the family completed the jailbreak escape room in record time (for that week, anyway) and without his parents getting into a fight; our 9-year-old being able to articulate how bizarre it was for Weird Al, someone he’s known only through audio and video, to appear onstage, in person, in the presence of our family (and countless others); my wife and I discovering anew the strength of our bond.
All of it is gift and grace. Even times of peril and uncertainty can be surprisingly rich. The fruit of our year of overplanning is that, rather than feeling materially spent by it all, my family is thriving. We’ve been enjoying rather than dreading the world around us, and even finding the calm to confront the scary bits of life with grace and determination.
This article also appears in the January 2026 issue of U.S. Catholic (Vol. 91, No. 1, page 43). Click here to subscribe to the magazine.
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