May You Be A Lighthouse

My vision and prayer for all of us in 2025

Dec 31, 2024

2024 was a bitter pickle. Inshallah, 2025 will bring out the best in many of us.

As the forces of inequality and disunity are getting more and more time on the world’s stage, my vision and prayer for you and me and all of us in 2025 is:

May you be a lighthouse!

Here are five focus areas in 2025 to maintain the integrity and resilience of our light in a challenging world:

1. Be a Decent Human Being

At the center of who you are, you know your core values. You know what it means to be a decent human being.

Political forces, economic pressures, media propaganda will try their hardest to get you to swap out your core values for theirs.

Don’t do it.

Remember who you are.

Write down your core values as if your life depends on it—because it does. Read your core values daily and weekly if it helps you. Read it with your family if it helps get everyone on the same page.

In the whirlwind of local, national, and global events, everything depends on remembering who you are.

Make sure that everything you do aligns with your core values. Let your humane values inform every decision you make for your family, what you say and do at work, what you say and do in your community, how you vote, what you support, what you resist, etc.

Stay vigilant about the small compromises that tend to erode integrity and equality over time.

We can change the world by increasing the number of decent human beings in the world.

Make sure you are one of them. Make sure you stay one of them.

2. Serve Local and Global Communities

Nobody does anything by themselves. We are all supported by many other people who make what we do possible.

Get more involved with your family, neighbors, and local communities. Support whatever needs support on a local level with your local allies.

Learn about what is happening globally. Research what is happening in Palestine, Sudan, and Congo. Go beyond what the mainstream media says about it. I mean really research it like you were writing a college research paper about it, looking at the issues from all angles.

Support movements for the people who are being oppressed. Donate. Advocate. Amplify their voices.

We’re all connected. What happens to a family on the other side of the world is connected to your family. If the tables were turned and it was your family undergoing oppression, you would want people from anywhere and everywhere to advocate for you.

3. Redefine Abundance

There are no riches more valuable than time and health with your family. Draw your sense of success from your time with your family.

Talk together. Make meals together. Dine together. Play games together. Sing together. Laugh together.

This is it.

If you have this, you won.

If you don’t have this, go get it.

There are 8 billion+ people in this world. Everybody could use somebody in their life. A friend. An uncle. An auntie. A big sister. A big brother. Chosen families. Extended families. Get plugged in. On a spiritual level, we’re all one family anyway.

Unsubscribe from the rat race. Know that you are not a rat. Know that you are not born to race with rats. :)

Seriously, though, you don’t need to travel to every country on earth to be interesting. You don’t need that expensive car. You don’t need a bigger house. You don’t need so many of the things you think you need to feel fulfilled.

Connect and create and draw your sense of abundance from that.

4. Lean on Divinity

You are a spiritual being whose foundation is the Creator of all spiritual beings.

Whether you call that Creator by the name of Allah, God, Source, Love, Life, etc, call on that Creator as often as you possibly can.

Keep the remembrance of your Creator in the center of your heart, in the back of your mind, and on the tip of your tongue at all times.

Engage in prayer, meditation, contemplation, reading scriptures, reading spiritual poetry.

Use writing as prayer, writing as contemplation, writing as a response to scripture. Write your own prayers, meditations, and poetry. (I’ve done this my whole life).

Ask for guidance. Ask for strength. Ask for wisdom. Ask for help. And give thanks for everything.

The regular practice of maintaining this connection with your Creator is what will give you the peace, strength, courage, and inspiration you need in calm and turbulent times.

5. Imagine a Better World

As a decent human being, if you could redesign how society operates, what would you change?

How would you address the inequality? Between women and men? Between people of different skin colors? Between people of different income levels and access to opportunities? Between human settlements and animal habitats? Between the healthy and the sick? Between the young and old?

Until we start imagining a better world, a better world cannot appear. It first has to be imagined. That’s the first requirement. Then it has to be worked. That’s the second requirement.

It doesn’t even need to be a complete overhaul if you don’t want it to be. What would you tweak and adjust? What would you update and upgrade?

Take a few minutes today to write down 3 inequalities you've personally witnessed in your community. Then imagine specific solutions for each one.

Start a journal dedicated to your “better world” ideas

Form a small discussion group in your community to share these visions.

Create art, writing, or other creative works that depict your imagined better world.

Connect with organizations already working toward similar visions.

Go through this thought process. Write out, draw out, map out what a more equal society might look like.

(Send me your ideas. I will take the top 10 ideas and share them in a future post.)

It is not someone else’s responsibility to imagine and build a better world. It is ours. And if enough of us start imagining a better world, we will begin to think and act and organize in ways to draw it closer to us.

This is my new year vision and prayer for all of us: