Lynne Baab

Praying about the flow of time: Praying for the New Year with symbols

Lynne Baab • Thursday January 9 2025

The prayer leader showed me a plastic bin full of pieces of fabric. All were solid colors, and I could see a range of blues, a forest of greens, and the yellows, reds, oranges, pinks, and purples of every kind of flower. She told me about the way she uses the box to lead groups into prayer.

She asks people to think about one praise and one concern. What color represents each prayer, she asks. Some people might be able to identify colors right away. Others may need to rummage in the box to identify a color that connects with one of the prayer requests or praises. She suggests that participants drape the colors around their shoulders, dance with them, twirl them like a flag, or just hold them as a symbol of their prayers. She provides felt tip pens and paper so people can draw with the colors they have chosen if they want to.

As we enter 2025, what color represents your hopes and desires for the year? If you can identify a color, figure out a way to put that color front and center. Perhaps a desktop or phone background. A scarf or article of clothing you could hang on a doorknob for a few days. A felt tip pen or watercolor sketch. Then try to pray those colors.

Maybe identifying a color doesn’t work well for you. Maybe you could think about the flavors of food, including sweet, tart, spicy, salty, rich, creamy, buttery, fruity, and tangy. What flavor or flavors would you like God to bring into 2025 for you? If you can identify one or more, pray those flavors.

Perhaps there’s a symbol that you could use to represent your prayers for 2025. A dove? Roses or other flowers budding, then blooming wildly? An apple tree full of fruit? A vineyard, a bird in flight, a sailboat ripping across the water, a peaceful lake in the mountains? If you can identify an image or picture that speaks of your hopes for this year, maybe you can draw that picture or find an image online that you can place prominently in your home or on your laptop or phone.

I was in a women’s group for several years about a decade ago, and the leader loved the idea of a word for the year. In November, she would ask us to start thinking about a word that captured our hopes for the next year, and she would ask again in December and January. I could never identify a word related to looking ahead. Instead, I found it helpful to identify words that summarized the previous year for me. I remember two years in a row I identified “receptivity” as my lesson from God for the previous year.

Perhaps a word for the year works better for you than it does for me. Perhaps a word works better than a color, flavor, or symbol to represent what you’d love to see God do in and through your life in 2025.

These ideas I’m advocating here are not New Year’s resolutions, which are focused on something we intend to do. The colors, images, symbols, or words that I’m suggesting are non-cognitive ways of praying about our hopes.  

As I was preparing to write this post, a picture kept coming to my mind: a grove of olive trees. Have you ever seen olive trees? When I first saw them, their gray-green color seemed faded and barely alive in comparison to Seattle’s deep greens of evergreen trees and bright greens of deciduous trees. Olive tree branches seemed twisted and gnarled compared to most trees I was familiar with. Their faded color and twisted limbs remind me of my life right now. Yet very old olive trees — even hundreds of years old — keep bearing olives. In 2025, I want to be a fruitful tree, even on those days when I don’t feel bright green.

I don’t know what that fruit will look like, and at the end of 2025, I still might not know. I believe we often can’t see the fruitfulness of our own lives. Our job is to love, honor, and follow Jesus, keeping our roots deep in the Holy Spirit’s living water, trusting God for fruit in its season. I want to pray that my faded colors and gnarled limbs will somehow bring honor to God like an olive tree, even when I can’t see the fruit.

Creator God, you made the colors we see around us. You made such a wide variety of flavors in food. You used such artistry when you created birds and flowers and fruit trees. You gave us words to identify our longings. Help us identify colors or flavors or symbols or a word to capture our longings for 2025. Meet us in our longings and give us hope.

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Next week: Praying for light. Illustration by Dave Baab: in Dave’s early years as a painter, he sometimes experimented with colors.

I wrote a series of blog posts about being receptive to God and offering ourselves to God. The first post is here. Some of my favorite posts in the series:

• A prayer expressing our dependence on God
• Another world walking beside ours
• Tears
• Offering my (messy) song to God

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Lynne M. Baab, Ph.D., is an author and adjunct professor. She has written numerous books, Bible study guides, and articles for magazines and journals. Lynne is passionate about prayer and other ways to draw near to God, and her writing conveys encouragement for readers to be their authentic selves before God. She encourages experimentation and lightness in Christians spiritual practices. Read more »

Lynne is pleased to announce the release of her two 2024 books, both of them illustrated with her talented husband Dave's watercolors. She is thrilled at how good the watercolors look in the printed books, and in the kindle versions, if read on a phone, the watercolors glow. Friendship, Listening and Empathy: A Prayer Guide guides the reader into new ways to pray about the topics in the title. Draw Near: A Lenten Devotional guides the reader to a psalm for each day of Lent and offers insightful reflection/discussion questions that can be used alone or in groups. 

Another recent book is Two Hands: Grief and Gratitude in the Christian  Life, available in paperback, audiobook, and for kindle. Lynne's 2018 book is Nurturing Hope: Christian Pastoral Care for the Twenty-First Century, and her most popular book is Sabbath-Keeping: Finding Freedom in the Rhythms of Rest (now available as an audiobook as well as paperback and kindle). You can see her many other book titles here, along with her Bible study guides.

You can listen to Lynne talk about these topics: empathy, bringing spiritual practices to life. Sabbath keeping for recent grads., and Sabbath keeping for families and children.

Lynne was interviewed for the podcast "As the Crow Flies". The first episode focuses on why listening matters and the second one on listening skills. 

Here are two talks Lynne gave on listening (recorded in audio form on YouTube): Listening for Mission and Ministry and Why Listening Matters for Mission and Ministry.

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"Dear Dr. Baab, You changed my life. It is only through God’s gift of the sabbath that I feel in my heart and soul that God loves me apart from anything I do."
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