A transformational year-end review

Happy weekend and happy holidays, friends! This weekend’s newsletter is meant to be read quickly but processed slowly.

I spent a good amount of time and energy the last few days creating what’s here — so, I hope you’ll make the effort to look through and consider working through it all.

You’ll find 2 PDF’s:

I hope you can make space the next few weeks to print these out (or copy-paste into a doc) and process through them together — with your spouse or a trusted friend.

An accurate understanding of where you’re at and where you’re going will lead to more presence in your day-to-day.

🤟🏻 jerv

"The unexamined life is not worth living."
— Socrates

"If people can’t see what God is doing, they stumble all over themselves; But when they attend to what he reveals, they are most blessed."
— Proverbs 29:18

A few days ago, my wife posted a story on her Instagram that we had just spent a day starting our annual review.

We do this a few times a year to make sure we’re on the same big-picture page in life and actually living out our weeks in the direction we want to go.

In the Instagram story, she shared that in the past when I’d try to lead us into reviewing our year and planning for the upcoming one, she would get triggered, internally panic, shut down, and want to run away and crawl up in a ball.

A subconscious, visceral reaction to what seemed to me like just trying to lead our family well.

To me, a level-10 reaction to a level-2 action. To her, a natural response to a terrifying stimulus.

She said she received dozens of DM’s from women this week who said they are experiencing the same thing when their husbands want to talk about the future.

There’s obviously A LOT of layers here for us in our 20+ year relationship — and for you in the context of your marriage, family, backgrounds, etc.

One of the main reasons for her strong flight-freeze response to evaluation over the years is that she was so far into the weeds of “working IN” our family

that she couldn’t come out of it all to begin “working ON” our family.

She was drowning in the minutia of daily, hourly, moment-by-moment life with toddlers and cooking and driving and cleaning and all of it.

I wanted us to thrive. She just wanted to survive.

I wanted to help and lead. She just wanted to breathe.

To be honest, I wasn’t surviving very well during those years either. But my solution was to reset and recast vision and reorganize everything, all the time — to help her, to help us! Not bad or insensitive at all. Just on a totally different wavelength.

What she needed was just relief, not a reset. We were on different chapters — not just different pages.

There comes a point in family life when we need to press a giant Pause button and assess the reality of “we’re barely surviving” to address the critical areas to triage.

To give you hope, I believe you can thrive. You can work ON your family. You can work ON your life.

I believe we have to be willing to release the tension with our expectations of each other and our assumed roles —

and ask good questions to be able to get on the same book, same chapter, same page.

For years, I tried over and over to come up with new and improved ways to do everything in our family life. It never worked.

What we really needed was an honest, non-judgmental, simple way to just see where each other were at as the year came to a close.

That’s what I hope to offer you in this newsletter with 3 weeks left in 2025.

What gets reviewed gets improved.

When we pause to evaluate what’s actually happening inside us (working ON our lives) — we give ourselves the chance to elevate what’s working IN our lives, eliminate what’s not, delegate what shouldn’t be ours to carry, and even automate some rhythms that lead us toward health in all areas.

This is good stewardship, and it can help many of us move out of survival and into real progress.

Here are 5 helpful questions for a transformational year-end review. Click to download & print.

1. What is the one thing that made me feel most like my true self this year?

2. What is the one thing that most pulled me away from my true self?

3. What is the one thing God used most clearly to shape me this year?

4. What is the one thing I need to end, the one thing I need to begin, & the one thing I need to release as I enter 2026?

5. What’s the one thing to improve in my life in 2026 that would unlock the biggest transformation in all other areas?

This next PDF is an updated list of 40 diagnostic questions I’ve used in the past to get clear on what the year was like for us — and to lookahead to the coming year to prepare.

In Luke 14, Jesus himself said: “For which of you, desiring to build a tower, does not first sit down and count the cost…?”

If you typically get triggered when asked to evaluate, to think deeper or bigger, to dream and envision what could be, to even do a little bit of simple prep —

perhaps it’s time to release the tension and pressure of all the things you feel like you hold together about your daily life.

Give them (back) to Jesus — and ask him to help you make space in your inner being for what could be, for what he may want for your next year.

Whenever you’re ready, you can work through this long list of questions together with your spouse or a trusted friend. Click here to download & print, or copy-paste.

I hope this serves you as 2025 comes to a close.

God makes all things new.

If you haven’t yet and want to see what it’s all about it — click this link or the one below!

Over the course of 1 week, you’ll be guided through organizing and simplifying key areas of your family life — the calendar, relationships, finances, values and vision, etc.

(Even though you’re subscribed here already, you’ll still need to put your email in, so the system can send you through the 7 days.)

Love to you all.

Tyler, Texas | December 7, 2025

PS - if this was in any way valuable to you, will you:

1) reply and let me know?

2) forward it to a friend who would be encouraged? 

*If this was forwarded to you and you're interested in more, you can subscribe to this newsletter here and see more of my stuff here.