This year, 2025 has been claimed the ‘Year of Venus’ by astronomers due to the extraordinary brightness the planet will display during the year. With this in mind, maybe 2025 should be declared ‘The Year of Love’.

Through December and January, social media was teeming with posts calling for ‘self-love’, ‘new desires for 2025’, and ‘putting myself first’ often with life transforming products you can buy to make it happen! Fitness courses, lotions, potions, detox teas, planners, nutritional organic matcha powders are going to make sure you succeed this year. Of course, the consumerist world we live in is set on making us feel deflated, uncared for and self-serving. It promises us happiness, satisfaction and success. It seeks to make big profit at our expense. It creeps in and to a greater or lesser extent makes us think, ‘Yeah, I deserve to be happy, I should get what I want!’ Of course, we can get this with next day delivery.

It is part of human instinct to feel broken and not good enough. This is the very reason we can be exploited. The sad thing is that this quest for more and more stuff will never make us feel happy or peaceful. We will still feel empty. We will still want more. What we really seek is peace. It is hard for companies to sell you peace. Peace is free. Peace comes from love and forgiveness for others. We can find it through acts of kindness, helping out others, and being mindful of our actions. It comes from knowing you are loved and cherished by God exactly as you are.

So, in 2025 – The Year of Love – Show love to others through your kindness and generosity, show love to our planet and neighbours far away by making compassionate and ethical choices with how you spend money, and show love to yourself by knowing you are ‘fearfully and wonderfully made’ (Psalm 139:14). You have everything you need in your heart.

Sophie Molyneux

Trainee Pastoral Worker for St Mary’s, Astbury and St John the Baptist, Smallwood