SPIRITUAL CHALLENGE for Personal Growth for December 2025

Read or Watch A Hopepunk story and compare it to the narratives of Christmas or Hannukah or Kwanzaa.

Some hope punk stories include:

• The Lord of the Rings
• Star Wars
• The Hail Mary Project
• The Hunger Games
• The Book of Eli
• Arrival
• The Shawshank Redemption

Find some more here.

As always, I’d love to hear about your experience with this challenge if you choose to take it on.

DAILY PRACTICE

• Daily Chalice Lighting: The chalice lit among us is a beacon. A beacon of hope, in a world in crisis. A beacon of possibility, made manifest in community. – Debra Faulk
• Daily Chalice Extinguishing: May you choose hope, even when it trembles. May it be the kind of hope that plants seeds, waits in the dark, and trusts the stirring. Hope that doesn’t deny despair, but dares to outlast it.  – Rev. Tandi Rogers
• Daily Reading/Meditation: “Faith, wherever it develops into hope, causes not rest but unrest, not patience but impatience. It does not calm the unquiet heart, but is itself this unquiet heart in [all of us]. Those who hope… can no longer put up with reality as it is, but begin to suffer under it, to contradict it. [It] means conflict with the world, for the goad of the promised future stabs inexorably into the flesh of every unfulfilled present.” – Jürgen Moltmann, Theologian