New Year’s Day 2026 – God is with you.

This year, you will become exactly who you were created to be.

You may wake into a new year and know you are not in the place you chose to live. You may realise you are having to make decisions around things that were not initially of your making. It could be that you feel forgotten or left behind. However, these are just one set of feelings based on your circumstances. There are truths to hold on to.

God is with you.

These difficult days won’t destroy you.

You will grow through them.

This year, people will look at you and see not someone drowning in a sea of hopelessness but someone who God was with throughout the whole story.

We have come to the end of this particular chapter of Hagar and Ishmael’s story. In a couple of verses, we have the most profound truth. Let’s read.

“God was with the boy as he grew up. He lived in the desert and became an archer. ²¹ While he was living in the Desert of Paran, his mother got a wife for him from Egypt.” (Genesis 21 v 20-21)

Let these words fall upon your soul today.

It may be the end of a part of the story, but it is also a beginning. Mark that.

“God was with the boy as he grew up.”

God was with him.

In that desert. In those moments of wondering why his father had agreed for him to be sent away with his mother, God was with him. Rejection by people does not mean in the slightest that God has rejected you.

“He lived in the desert and became an archer.” The desert was the making of him. He became that way because of where he was living. His circumstances demanded that he adjust to life and become something he perhaps never thought he would.

Maybe what you thought was your enemy is your friend? What if the place you have been thrown into is actually a training ground for a whole new beginning that is far from banishment?

“While he was living in the Desert of Paran, his mother got a wife for him from Egypt.”

Hagar was a resilient woman. Even though she had gone through so much, she didn’t have a victim mentality. She went back to her roots, her homeland, and found a wife for her son. Her son would have an identity, heritage, and he would belong.

Your situation doesn’t have to be perfect; the desert of Paran wasn’t the Promised Land, but God meets you where you are.

As we begin this new year, no matter what life is like right now, know this: God is with you. Your difficulty doesn’t define you, but His presence does.