Recently gave my Kindle away. Just lying around, it was time to give it a new home.

When I was looking through the library I had built on it before deactivating it, there was one book that I knew I’d want to find a way to keep. GOOD NEWS: It’s on Hoopla!

If you’ve been following this blog for any amount of time, this book will most likely sound familiar. Why? Because since 2016 I’ve read it every year. I just finished the ’24 reading. It may be the last time I hold to an annual commitment to read it. No doubt, I glean relevant takeaways each time I read it. And, interestingly, with each reading, I also observe personal growth based on the lens of my reading and my responses.

Paul David Tripp’s Awe is the book. This reading, chapters 7, 10, and 13 received the most highlights. Chapter 10, “Worldview,” is always a great reminder of how to look at current circumstances:

Your idea of God will never be either accurate or stable if you’ve arrived at it by trying to figure out what he is doing in the situations in your life…when you wear the glasses of Isaiah 40 you can understand yourself, others, meaning and purpose, right and wrong, identity, morality history, and the future properly.

Chapter 13, “Work,” I’ve blogged about before. What stood out today was Tripp’s many references to rest, which is my word for 2025.

Success is not about accruing power but about resting in God’s power…Awe of God teaches me that, by grace, my life of work can now be an expression of rest and not worry.

Chapter 7, “Complaint,” is consistently corrective, which oddly can be encouraging. The meat of the chapter discusses five questions that Tripp says steal or seal our hope; Tripp believes we answer these questions every day:

• Is God good?
• Will God do what he promised?
• Is God in control?
• Does God have the needed power?
• Does God care about me?

I encourage you to sit with these questions this week. They may renew your awe for what’s happened in ’24. They may seal your hope for what’s going to happen in ’25.

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash