December is always a good time to look back on how the past year has been for us. For those who journal (and I would highly recommend it!), it’s a good time to flip back and review the things that God had done through the highlights and lowlights of 2025. At LifeSpring, we use the last Sunday of the year to look back at some of the events of the year in a spirit of gratitude.
Our theme for 2025 was fruitfulness. As I watched the end of year video on Sunday, I realized that so much has happened to be thankful for. It was a very fruitful year! But something that also dawned on me was that some of the fruit we saw in 2025 was due to seeds planted much earlier. I was curious about the idea of seeds and fruit, so I asked AI about it: how long does it take for a plant to go from seeds to fruit? The answer is a range. Some fruit like tomatoes (yes, tomatoes are technically a fruit!) can show up in as little as two or three months. Fruit from big trees like pears can take over ten years before we see anything.
As I looked back on our church journal for 2025, I think the same principle applies. Some of the fruits from the year were because of seeds planted a couple of months before. Other fruit was because of seeds planted over a decade or more ago.
For example, in April we had our Wildfire Sunday Celebration. This is the Sunday where we have our young adults run our service, from beginning to end. And they did a great job! A highlight for me was realizing that for our Wildfire Sunday as well as another Sunday in August, we had two new speakers, Josh and Andrea. For both of them, it was the first time they had given a sermon. They had grown up at Lifespring, and somewhere along their journey God planted a seed that they could bless others through preaching. We got to see the fruit of that in 2025.
Another fruit was recognizing the huge amount of people we have serving at LifeSpring. There is a saying in churches that 20% of the congregation does 80% of the work. I’m so thankful that at LifeSpring, it is closer to 80% of people doing 80% of the work. A good example is our Kingdom Kids ministry. Over the past year, we had over 30 people serve as a shepherd at one point or another. If you’ve served as a shepherd, thank you so much for your investment in our children. You are making a real impact.
Another thing that stood out to me was our involvement in serving people outside the church in 2025. For our Family Weekend, we had a chance to learn about tools for care that can be used with refugees. This was not a fruit that appeared out of nowhere, but grew from a seed that was planted in 2023 during a visit to Turkey by myself, Gabe, and Rodney. Over the summer, we also hosted two large barbecues in the 415 Willowdale community in partnership with representatives from the City of Toronto. This was the result of a seed planted just after the pandemic, when we decided to support the Food Hub at 415 Willowdale financially. In September, we decided to sponsor a mom and baby program in Rubongi, Uganda. The seed for this was planted in the early 2010s, when we visited Rubongi for the first time.
LifeSpring family, 2025 was truly a year of blessing and fruitfulness. These are just a couple of snippets from the many ways that God has been working among us in 2025. As we enter 2026 on the theme of Increase our Faith, we look forward to the way that God will increasingly use us to bless others. And we do this in the spirit of Matthew 28:18-20,
Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”