My husband was a high school principal for many years. Friday nights in fall were mostly spent at the football stadium cheering for the boys on the field. There was many a time when we reached the fourth quarter when I would look at the scoreboard and try to predict what the outcome of the game would be. Maybe the first quarter had started with a quick touchdown. The players, adrenaline pumping through their bodies, would run to their positions on the field while the ball was then placed on the 50 yard line to be kicked to the opposite team. Cheering fans of the team with the first score would feel quite confident that the good start to the game was a good omen that pointed to a strong and victorious outcome.

By the fourth quarter, a lot of things could have changed since that quick first touchdown. Many a time, when the fourth quarter would start, the outcome of the was still very much unknown. Sometimes, I would anxiously look at my husband and ask, “Who do you think will win?” He would always say, “The game isn’t over. That’s why we play the game. We play to find out who will be the winner soon.”

As we head into the final quarter of this year, I find it hard to continue the use of this football analogy as I reflect upon the year. Let’s face it. Most of us aren’t thinking about winning and/or losing as we head towards the end of 2020. I think most of us just hope to survive the year with our sanity, our health, our relationships, our finances, our faith, and our country still intact.

High school teachers, as I once was, think in quarters when it comes to the school year. We design our lesson plans according to objectives we hope to reach by the end of each quarter. At the end of a quarter, grades are tallied, and a quarter grade is given. Those quarter grades don’t count for much until they are added together at the end of two quarters to determine a semester grade. At the end of the school year, four quarters of grades are rolled together and the student is given a grade for the year. I often used to give a pep talk to students at the end of a semester or a quarter where I would rally them around the idea that there was still time to bring up a grade if the academics were taking a back seat in their lives. We’d talk about strategies for improvement. We talk about the changes that might need to be made when it came to getting tasks done, assignments turned, or behavior that might need to change.

In life, we aren’t graded on how we live our days or on how we complete a year. For that I am grateful. I’m not so sure how I would even come up with a rubric for knowing how to determine a score for this year.

At the beginning of each year, I do come up with a word that I hope will be my focus for the year. At the end of 2019, I chose the word shalom for my word for 2020. Yet, as the days of 2019, waned, I kept having another word come into my mind: Winnow. Winnow? I kept asking myself where that word came from. Who has ever had a focus word like winnow for a new year? I would ask myself. I mean really, who would select a word that denotes a process of sifting, separating, or stirring up for a focus word for the year?

The word winnow stuck with me enough that I ended up looking towards 2020 with

shalom

winnow

as the two words I expected to see worked out in my life.

As I wrote in my journal at the end of 2019, I reflected on the end of the decade that had irrevocably changed my life with the death of my beloved daughter in 2010. I had also lost my beloved younger sister at the end of the third quarter of 2019, and I did not expect to see my mother live to make it to 2020. In my journal I wrote

As I thought of my mother’s impending death, I wrote of hoping to find shalom which would mean a personal sense of peace and wholeness as I went into the last years of my life without my mother and without my sister.

I had begun 2019 with the word justice as the word to inform and direct my year. I decided that justice rightly flowed into the word shalom because you really can’t have one without the other. That is when that disruptive word winnow showed up in my mind and in my writing.

As I reflect back on those words I chose for 2020, and as I reflect back upon my thoughts as I headed into 2020, I am amazed.

What has this year been if it has not been a year of many of us seeking, praying for, working for shalom and justice? It turns out that 2020, has also been a year of the great winnowing. I don’t think the sifting if over yet.

I began 2020 hoping for a new beginning. I did not know that our entire nation would see changes that would shake us to the very core.

There is so much unknown about how this year will end. There is much uncertainty. The beginning of the fourth quarter of this year, is not to be compared a football game yet, how this year ends will be reflected on score boards that record just how many of our fellow Americans we have lost to a virus we knew nothing about at the end of 2019.

I’m not going to grade this year, or the way I have reacted or responded to it. Instead, I will again reflect upon the words that were the focus for my year. I pray for shalom.

I recognize that this truly has been a year of winnowing. I pray that we all can “separate and distinguish” falsehood from truth,” that we will able to think critically and sift through all of the many messages that we receive daily and stand for and stand firm in truth. I pray that as the wheat is sifted from the chaff, we will end the year and find that the impurities that keep us from living together in peace and love will have been blown away.

As I head into these last months of 2020 pray I will remember these words

I really know of no other way to go through such days as we might have before us. Stand firm. Endure. May we all find and live in peace. Shalom.