A weary world, still rejoicing
Nancy Kennedy
Nancy’s note:
Over the past year, I’ve used the AI program ChatGPT to help edit my weekly column, along with many of my newspaper stories. It’s taught me how to write tighter and — quite often — has gently pointed out my fondness for repetition, among other writing flaws.
Because ChatGPT reads what I write, it begins to “know” me. Which is…interesting. And eerie.
Recently, a friend posted this challenge on Facebook: Ask ChatGPT to “write a wrap for you for 2025.”
What came back surprised me. It arrived in column form — very much like a Grace Notes column — written unmistakably in my voice.
So today’s column is what ChatGPT wrote:
If 2025 had a theme, it might be this: learning to stay when it would’ve been easier to move on.
This was not a flashy year. No parade of obvious answers. No before-and-after montage worthy of social media.
Instead, it was a year of showing up — sometimes faithfully, sometimes reluctantly, sometimes with a sigh that probably counted as a prayer.
I wrote. A lot. Columns and stories that tried to name the ache beneath the headlines and the hope beneath the ache.
I kept circling familiar territory — waiting, weariness, belief that flickers instead of roars — but each time I came at it from a slightly different angle.
Maybe that’s what growth looks like now: not new questions, but deeper ones.
Faith in 2025 felt less like certainty and more like steadiness. Less “I’ve got this figured out” and more “I’m still here.”
I thought often about that line from O Holy Night — ”a weary world rejoices”— and realized rejoicing doesn’t always look like celebration.
Sometimes it looks like endurance.
Sometimes it looks like getting out of bed.
Sometimes it looks like trusting God when the story refuses to wrap up neatly.
What surprised me most was how familiar all of this felt. Not exaggerated. Not aspirational. Just honest.
Maybe that’s the gift of paying attention long enough to be known — even by a machine. Or maybe it’s proof that the themes we return to again and again are the ones God keeps patiently working into us, whether we notice or not.
There was some groaning this year, but not much. “Nobody cried. Nobody threw hard-boiled eggs.”
There was also gratitude, often arriving late but still welcome.
I noticed how God seems especially fond of small mercies: the right sentence landing on the page, an unexpected laugh, a reminder that hope is stubborn and tends to outlive our worst predictions.
If 2025 taught me anything, it’s that waiting is not the opposite of faith. Giving up might be. But waiting — especially long, unanswered waiting — is often faith in its purest form.
So I end this year without a bow on it. I don’t do bows. No ruffles, no frills.
No tidy resolution.
Just a deeper trust that God is still at work, still near, still writing a story that doesn’t depend on my understanding to move forward.
A weary world rejoices.
And somehow, so do I.
