As we leave 2024 and enter 2025, this is an ideal time to reflect on the past year and look ahead to the upcoming year. People often do this, especially when considering any “New Year’s Resolutions” they may be planning to try. As we do so, I would remind everyone that our past is our legacy. What we have done and said is how we will be remembered.

Judy White Edelson, in a piece entitled “Not All Bridges Can Be Burned,” puts the warning to us this way: “If one day you decide you no longer want to be the person you have become, or live the life you are living, it is no easy task to stop all that accumulated momentum. You won’t go to bed tonight and get up tomorrow a new person.

“You don’t have the same option little babies have, learning to walk and talk and think for the first time; you have to learn to walk and talk and think in a new way. That accomplished, there is the pesky little problem of all those people who know you as the person you were, not the person you want to be; who through no perverse unkindness, but through expectation, keep pulling you back into the old mold.

“So your life history is your permanent record. You can’t shake it. You may be able to redeem it with great effort, but given my druthers, I would rather have written my permanent record with forethought and careful planning, and skipped the would’uvs, could’uvs, should’uvs. You really can’t burn your bridges; they are there even if you change your name and move to a new address. Even if you claim you never knew you.”

Jesus put it this way: “By their fruits you shall know them.” And the fruits that he was talking about the Apostle Paul listed clearly for us: “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.”

As we look back on 2024 and our entire lives, and look forward to 2025 and beyond, let us consider, take stock, and reflect on how each of us will be remembered. What words will people use to describe each of us? In addition, let us each ask ourselves what kind of person we aspire to be. Where can we improve in our “fruits of the Spirit”?

Love, patience, kindness, gentleness, etc. are hard to come by nowadays, whether in politics, economics, or social media. Let us each take the time to consider how we might become better persons and, in turn, make our society better as well. There is a saying that a single act of human kindness, once set in motion, endures forever. May kindness and the other fruits of the Spirit be what we are known for in 2025 and beyond.

Rev. Michael Carter is the minister of the First Congregational Church in South Paris and a member of the Oxford Hills Area Clergy Association.