Jeff Lucas: Here’s my New Year’s resolution for 2026

After an enforced season of pain thawed a frozen faith, Jeff Lucas has been inspired to make a New Year’s resolution

The doctor looked serious. “Jeff, I must warn you that the surgery you need calls for a two-week recovery period. It will be extremely painful.” I nodded and signed the consent form. “Any allergies?” he asked, a question usually put to me in restaurants. Only to pain, I thought. 

As the day of the surgery dawned, I told God that I wanted to use my enforced surgical slowdown as a spiritual retreat. This was no casual request. The last five years had been brutal, leaving my faith not dead, but somewhat dormant, hibernating beneath the arctic frost of a seemingly never-ending winter. I still believed, but faith had turned into frozen theory. And so I prayed, mumbling my desperation to see Jesus move, act, speak, nudge – anything, really, that might show me he was alive on that grey Wednesday rather than just on that Easter Sunday morning two millennia earlier.