PHOTO PROVIDED Rev. Dr. Mark Boyea

We have just recently completed that time of year when TV networks, magazines, and news sources — both print and digital – participate in the annual “Year In Review” ritual, offering their take on the best and worst of the year just passed. Sometimes though, instead of taking a look back at just the previous year, they’ll go really big, as CNN did back on New Year’s Eve of 1999 when it ran a program called “The 100 Most Influential People of the Millenium” (in case you missed it, they picked Johannes Gutenberg, inventor of the printing press, as #1). Or, when a few years ago, Time magazine published “The Most Influential Photographs of All Time.”

Included in Time’s selections were the first cell phone picture ever taken; a photo of Mamie Till-Mobley staring at the battered, lynched remains of her son, Emmett, a picture which revealed the horrors of racism to many Americans who did not realize its scope and brutality at that time; and more recently, the widely seen photo of a 3-year-old Syrian refugee’s lifeless body washed up on the shore of the Turkish town of Bodrum.

Photos like that remind us that not only does “every picture tells a story,” or that “every picture is worth a thousand words (or more),” but that pictures have the power to change lives, societies, nations, and the world. They have the power to move us to do and be better, to see what is, and from there, envision what could be …

While it is not an actual photograph, the end of each year offers us that exact kind of picture. At Christmas, God saw the world and humanity as it was — as it is — and sent Jesus to help us do and be better; to show us and teach us what God sees and believes we could be.

So now, with Christmas come and gone, and the start of a new year underway, we are presented once more with the questions: What photograph would you like to see in your life’s, our nation’s, or the world’s year-end review for 2024? What picture would you like to see at the end of the year of who you have become that you are not yet? What important issue in our community, nation or world would you like to see a picture of major progress having been made in?

Whatever it is, picture it and hold onto that picture. Brain research has demonstrated that to picture something in our “mind’s eye” and hold it there day after day can be a powerful tool for helping us stay committed to working to make that picture become a reality. But in order to do that, we must first believe in the possibility of it happening. We must believe in its possibility because without that hope dies. Without that cynicism wins — the cynicism that seems to increasingly infect every aspect of our lives in this time.

And most of all, we must believe in its possibility because we are the people of a God who at Christmas and throughout the year reminds us how much God believes in our possibilities.

Picture that.

The Rev. Dr. Mark Boyea is senior minister at the Sanibel Congregational United Church of Christ.