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Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

With 2025 coming to a close, I’m thinking about the year behind me and the year ahead. I had a lot happen this year, as you might have read. I’m still sleeping in the RV, and yes, it’s cold here in Montana. This year, I met a man who I hope will become my husband. I’m writing and thinking as I love, and I’m still trying to understand what that means for the world.

So, cheers to 2025 and to you! With the year almost behind us, here’s a round-up of the best things I think happened. You tell me what you think, too:

In September of 2025, President Trump created a initative called “America Prays”. I’ll tell you why this is a good thing and remind you why it doesn’t violate the separation of church and state (which is easy to think it does).

The nationwide initiative encouraged Americans to dedicate one hour weekly to prayer. This effort called for faith communities to unite for national strength, peace, and liberty, and emphasized prayer's role in the nation's foundation.

The argument for why this is a good thing is simple: openly affirming prayer is one of the clearest ways to protect religious freedom. Prayer is not a niche or exclusively a religious act. It is nearly universal. Present in almost every faith tradition, and ancient to humanity itself.

I believe it is better understood as an inherently human practice. It has endured across cultures and time. It is no wonder prayer has a unique name in every language.

And, we have to be reminded, there is a long historical precedent for Presidents and their spiritual efforts. George Washington established the national house of worship, which would later be known as the National Cathedral. Treating government as if it must be atheist in order to remain neutral misunderstands what religious freedom actually requires. Religious freedom means it’s safe to practice here.

And so an event like this, however symbolic it is, signals that spiritual expression is safe and permitted in the public square. This does not ask a nation to become a church or to embody religious perfection; it simply acknowledges the power of prayer to shape the human heart.

And, political leaders are imperfect, but their imperfections do not negate the value of endorsing something fundamentally good. For anyone who prays, you know the power prayer has to change the heart. It is reasonable, then, to hope it might also soften the hearts of those in power.

The ban on TikTok in the US was intended to take place on December 16th, just days ago. Obviously, this didn’t happen, but the new date for the ban is January 23rd, 2026. We are still awaiting an unprecedented ban on a Chinese-owned application that is taking over our time, our data, and our attention. I have never seen an application banned in the United States, and I worked in crypto. There are plenty of applications that should be banned there.

A ban on TikTok makes sense to me on philosophical and spiritual grounds because attention is not neutral: it is formative. What we give our attention to shapes our inner life, our capacity for depth, and our ability to relate to reality without constant stimulation.

TikTok is engineered for fragmentation: it trains the nervous system and the brain to crave novelty, speed, and emotional spikes, slowly eroding stillness, discernment, and interiority. Although the political reasons for the ban have to do with national security, they secondarily have to do with what I care about, and I’ll take it as a win.

Spiritually, this matters because most traditions understand silence, presence, and sustained attention as prerequisites for wisdom. A society that cannot sit with itself becomes easily manipulated, reactive, and unmoored. At a time when we already live under conditions of distraction and psychological intrusion, drawing a boundary around technologies that aggressively harvest attention is not censorship. It is a recognition that human consciousness is something worth protecting.

The removal of an application like TikTok from American life would help protect against the harmful creep of social technologies into every second of Americans’ lives. Today, we are fighting for our attention in a spiritual war, and I’ll take anything that helps us in that battle.

Although we have yet to see TikTok banned, I hope we’re on the right track and that we do see it removed from all phones in the following year.

I sort of felt the shift this year. Did you?

We badly need ethics in both AI and crypto, and while the headlines still skew toward speculation (who raised millions; which token is pumping), I do feel 2025 nudged things, however slightly, in the right direction.

It’s still hard to feel optimistic if you stare too long at the broader tech landscape, so if you’re looking for hope, honestly, look elsewhere, but there were real conversations this year about responsibility, limits, and human cost, and those matter.

AI, in particular, has forced an ethics reckoning. Anyone who uses these systems regularly can see why. Hallucinations create misinformation. The technology can subtly persuade you if you’re not careful. And for the love of Jesus Christ, please don’t use it as a therapist.

Full disclosure: I use AI for editing, research, and finding words that once required flipping through a dictionary. But right now, integrity depends on how you define the rules. You have to decide what it’s for, where it stops, and what you won’t outsource. If you know what creates integrity in your work and you follow those boundaries, the tool becomes support rather than a crutch.

And, I’ve lived through all the tech booms of the century (I’m not that old, but I’m old enough), and the problem remains this idea that if you regulate, you hurt innovation. But that’s just not true. You have to regulate, or set ethical standards, in the earliest stages, especially for consumers. Consumers get attached to what they can get (companies know this). If you give them total freedom to AI a pair of tits onto Joe Biden, they won’t give that (I don’t blame them).

So, you have to regulate it NOW. You have to do it early.

It’s like a child. If it starts showing bad behavior young and it’s not corrected, it will become a poorly behaved adult that no one wants to be around, but you have to keep around because you’re just so attached (and it’s the problem child YOU created). It becomes harder to let go and create change. AI companies are still using this basic scapegoat to try to thwart regulation, but we desperately need it.

Don’t be fooled. Crypto didn’t get it, and now we’re not even really sure where the industry is going besides memecoins and more ways for banks not to call themselves a bank.

The Roman Catholic Church started this year as the Holy Year of Jubilee. I was actually there at the Vatican, in Rome, when Pope Francis opened the Jubilee year, themed as Pilgrims of Hope. In the same year, we saw the change of Papal power with the passing of Pope Francis on Easter Monday.

The year of Jubilee is symbolic of a renewal of our spiritual life. A call to return to it. I saw this this year. Not just with my own life, but with others my age, from far corners of the world, and ones close by.

Biblically, Jubilee comes from Leviticus 25, where every fifty years (although the Church now recognizes this every 25 years) debts are forgiven, slaves are freed, land is returned, and accumulation is forcibly interrupted. It’s intended as a divine reset, not because people earned it, but because without interruption, power concentrates, hearts harden, and societies collapse under their own weight. Jubilee exists because human systems do not self-correct. God and our own practices intervene.

The meaning of Jubilee doesn’t depend on whether people participate liturgically, either. Its challenge is universal, and I felt, in the collective this year, a return to what we may have forgotten: a spiritual life at the center of our being.

I saw, and I asked myself, what would it mean to have spirituality at the center of our lives? How have I forgotten it? Where can I be the hope I’m seeking? How am I allowing God to move in my life? Where can I renew myself, as I’d like to see the world renew as well?

What do your wins look like this year?

Try writing them all down. Just bullet point them and don’t think too hard. You tried something new? You left a job you didn’t like? You made more money or met a mountain man?

I’d love to know what wins you had. Do reply with them if you’re so inclined to share.

Love,
Val

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