One year and one day ago, I wrote: “I declare 2021 The Year of Hypomone.” As you’ll see if you read that post, hypomone is a New Testament word meaning “patient endurance,” and I hope we have all learned a few things about endurance in the past … well, two years. But endurance is not enough.

Today I say: I declare 2022 The Year of Repair.

This is the year when we must turn our attention not to innovation or disruption or any of the other cool buzzwords, but to fixing the shit that needs fixing.

As Steven J. Jackson has shown in an absolutely seminal essay, our situation requires “broken world thinking,” and broken world thinking leads to an imperative of repair.

We will look unflinchingly at what is broken.

We will repent of and ask forgiveness for our role in the breaking.

We will scout the landscape for the tools of repair, and be especially attentive to what we have discarded, what we have labeled as refuse. We will therefore practice “filth therapy.”

I think of these words: “Don’t be afraid, says Yeshua. Far more can be mended than you know.”

We will therefore smile, if wryly, as we sing the song of this year: