When I was little, I hated endings.

I cried on the last day of Kindergarten because I wasn’t ready for it to be over.

When I finished a book series I loved, I had a hard time pushing back the sadness over not being able to go pick up the next one off the shelf.

After a sleepover, I wrote a journal entry about a movie we had watched the night before, bemoaning the fact that I would probably never see it again.

As I got a little older, I didn’t grow fonder of endings, but I came to accept them as part of life. I found Ecclesiastes 3:11b—“He has also set eternity in the human heart”—and clung to it as proof that my heart’s rebellion against endings was natural because I had been made for eternity.

I still don’t love endings, and I probably never will, but a few minutes ago, as I was thinking about the end of 2015, I remembered something that I tend to forget: With every ending comes a lovely little thing called a beginning.

I still hate turning the last page of a good book, watching the credits roll on a movie I loved, and saying goodbye to an old friend. But there’s something delicious about opening a new book cover, waiting in the dark of the theatre for a new movie to start, and going to an event to make a new friend. New . . . isn’t always the terrifying thing I make it out to be in my mind. Sometimes it’s pretty good.

That’s what I want 2016 to be: a year of new beginnings.

See you in the new year.