A lot has changed in a year. The entire world has changed. Many will tell you that 2025 has been full of bad stuff—the media, for example.

Tune in to the news. You will see footage of explosions, nuclear weapons, and random acts of reality TV. But if you look deeper, you’ll see good peeking through the surface.

For starters, on September 12, Betty Kellenberger made history by becoming the oldest woman to complete a thru-hike of the Appalachian Trail.

Betty began her hike, amazingly, almost immediately after knee replacement surgery. She traversed muddy bogs, snow, cold rain, and impossible rocks.

After completing her hike she told reporters, “I decided the Lord must love rocks because He made so many of them.”

Betty Kellenberger is 80 years old.

Also, Americans are making true progress in the fight against technological slavery. As of December, 35 U.S. states and Washington, D.C., have enacted laws effectively banning student cellphone usage in classrooms.

Now, if only

we could get Congress to ban speakerphone calls in supermarkets.

Also, this year, Japan elected its first female prime minister, Sanae Takaichi, shattering a centuries-old glass ceiling.

Takaichi is turning out to be a real go-getter, saying she sleeps two hours per night, “four hours at the longest.” Her first words in office were: "I will abandon the idea of a 'work-life balance'—I will work, work, work, work and work.”

Takaichi’s husband has likewise pledged to abandon the “work-life balance idea” and commits to playing significantly more golf.

The world also got its first American Pope, Robert Francis Prevost. Pope Leo XIV was born in Chicago, raised in Dolton, Illinois, and he roots for the White Sox. Unfortunately, there is a conflict of interest inasmuch as God is a Braves fan.

Either way, Pope “Bob” is a regular guy. That’s why people love him. He watches movies.…

The following story was mailed to me by a woman named Carole. The letter was written in pencil.

Carole’s mother was young. Twenty-two years old. She was married and pregnant with her second child. The year was 1945.

The War was freshly over. The Depression was still a recent memory. Carole’s mother wanted to buy her husband a gift for his birthday. He was turning 25.

Her husband had just gotten back from Europe. He had helped liberate the French. Viva la France.

He was battleworn. He was scarred all over. He wasn’t the same. It wasn’t the shrapnel, it was that he’d seen too much.

He got a job working as a janitor for a public school. It wasn’t a great job, but it put food on their table and diapers on their baby.

It was going to be a sparse birthday. The young mother only had $9. She was a homemaker who kept her loose change in a tin biscuit box. She saved up quarters and dimes and nickels in the box.

Only silver. No pennies.

One day, the mother was out shopping for her husband. She was going to buy him a pipe or a bottle of whiskey or something like that. But she met a man on the street.

The man was selling pencils. He had one leg. He was partly blind. He was singing songs to passersby. He was covered in rags. He, too, had been in the War. And he had the injuries to prove it.

She watched him grovel to pedestrians. And she watched people ignore the man. Something moved her. Something compelled the young mother to give him the box of money. It was only $9. But in 1945, 9 bucks was a lot of bread.

He cried when she gave it to him.

“I can’t take this,” he said.

“I want you to have it.”

“Why are you carrying around a…

My 13th birthday. Mama is driving. It is overcast outside. My kid sister is in the back seat, talking up a blue streak. I’m in the passenger seat, staring out the window.

We have just eaten pizza, I think. Or maybe it was Chinese we ate for my birthday. Either way, the birthday celebration is over—if you can call it “celebration”—and now we are heading back home.

Mama asks if I’m having a good birthday. I nod. But I don’t mean it.

I’m quiet. I’m always quiet. Ever since my father died several years ago, I just stay quiet. I don’t know why. Not much to say, I guess.

I think adults are sometimes concerned about me because I used to be so animated. I used to get up on stage at school, sing for plays, and act in silly musicals. I used to sing at church like I was auditioning for the Stamps Quartet. But now I’m mute.

“You sure you’re having a good birthday?” says Mama.

I nod again.

There are all these feelings inside me I can’t describe. I neither have

the vocabulary, nor the life experience to accurately diagnose myself.

I’m kind of angry, that much I know. But not at anyone in particular. Also, I’m depressed. I know that, too. But I don’t really know why.

“Birthdays just suck,” I explain to my mother.

I’m not supposed to say “suck.” It’s bad language. But my mother lets it slide because (a) I’m a teenager now, and (b) on some level, she knows I’m right.

And so we just drive. I watch cattle pastures go by. I watch miles of wire fencing roll past. I wish the sun would come out because I am a sun-aholic; I’m sad whenever it’s cloudy.

But it’s always overcast on my birthdays because my birthday is always in December and the sun won’t shine in December. Plus, December birthdays mean…