Kimberlee K.

This past Monday I shared my word of 2024, color, and the way it guided and impacted my year. But today I want to tell you about my word for this year.

My word for 2025 came early, really early, like halfway through 2024 early.

I was home one night and casually Googled, “nighttime bible study” and was surprised when the first image to pop up gave me that shiny, indescribable feeling.

It made me flinch—like, woah, it’s June, this can’t be right.

But I know the feeling. It’s almost like getting nauseous, but in a positive way, if that makes sense. It’s a brief, sudden ping that goes through my whole body.

Wonder.

I tossed the word around in my head like you would a slinkie between two hands, back and forth and back and forth, looking at it from all angles.

I didn’t know why I would get my word that soon, but I screenshotted the Bible study as a reminder.

A few days later, I turned on a Julia Roberts movie after dinner. One of my goals for 2024 was to watch all of her movies, and I’d been trying to keep up with what was streaming so that I could watch as many movies as possible for free.

I turned on a movie about a boy with physical deformities who tries to adjust to attending public school. The story is emotional and hard and beautiful and I was tearing up in the last few minutes, right before Julia Roberts delivers her last line of the movie:

“Augie,” she says to her son, “you truly are a wonder.”

I’m not sure how I missed that the film itself is called Wonder, but the combination of the two discoveries gave me goosebumps.

A few weeks later, I was editing a post for Thursday Faith and found this sentence in the body: “music can give us hope, it can offer healing, and it can bring us so much unexplainable wonder as we listen.”

And a week after that I was digging through my folder of essays and found one I’d written called, “Don’t Let Anyone Crush Your Wonder.”

Wonder wonder wonder wonder wonder.

It sparkled and sparkled, saying, yes, me!

So I walked through the second half of 2024 already knowing my word for 2025, and I found it was a word I used often. It was a feeling I sought after often. So much of my writing, I think, attempts to capture the wonder I find in the world around me. It says, “Look at this! Can you believe it?!”

Wonder feels so woven into the core of my life, of my being, that it was the first time I felt like, yes, of course, of course that is my word.

But in what capacity? What colors? What sounds and shapes and sizes?

Is it wonder I understand? Or that in which I’ve yet to learn?

I don’t know.

And I think that’s what has always enticed me about the feeling. Sometimes you can’t even pinpoint why you feel it, but you stare and you listen and you try and memorize its edges so you can hold onto it for as long as possible.

Maybe the year of wonder will be about highlighting those edges, maybe it will be about something entirely different. Maybe it will not be the fantastical wonder but its ponderous counterpart, who knows?

But the word pings and pings, sparkles and shines, waves its proverbial hands and says, ME.

Even this last month, as a few other words made me curious and I worried I had it wrong, I opened a chapter of the book I was reading and found this:

And then in a newsletter I subscribe to, they recommended this devotional for the Christmas season:

Needless to say, I got the idea.

And so I walk into the year of wonder, with my own arms open, saying, lead the way!