New Year's Introspection
By Karl Clauson
About six months ago, I was looking at my face in the mirror. I don’t normally linger. I’m not a big mirror looker. But my bride has one of those small concave mirrors stuck right onto the larger vanity mirror—the kind that lets you see things you don’t normally see.
That’s when I spotted it: a thin crease in my right cheek. I’d never noticed it before. I leaned in, gently separated the skin on both sides, and realized what I was seeing. The crease had become just deep enough that the sun couldn’t reach all of my skin. A faint white line—untouched, unseen—had been there for some time, quietly forming beyond my awareness.
I wasn’t freaked out—just the reality of getting older.
But that moment became a metaphor for what God has been graciously doing in my life over the last few years. Even since writing The Seven Resolutions, I’ve come to understand more deeply the power—and the beauty—of seeing myself as I really am. Introspection isn’t easy, but it may be one of the greatest gifts God gives us, and one of the first disciplines worth reclaiming as we head into 2026.
For years now, I’ve started my mornings praying David’s words from Psalm 139:23-24.
“Search me, O God, and know my heart!
Try me and know my thoughts!
And see if there be any grievous way in me,
and lead me in the way everlasting.”
In light of an all-knowing God—the One who knit us together in our mother’s womb and knew all our days before one of them came to be—it’s an awesome thing to invite Him to look at what we cannot see. That close inspection can be unnerving, disconcerting, even convicting. But this is where life truly changes. I’m convinced God is far more interested in what lies beneath the surface than what’s visible to others.
As you step into 2026, I want to encourage you to place yourself often before the God who knows you most. Let Him search you. Know you. Reveal what is hurtful—and lead you into truth and freedom. Even five quiet minutes each morning, offered in humility, can become one of the most transformational disciplines of your life. It breathes vitality into prayer, Scripture, community, and worship because you now bring honest self-awareness and deep dependence on God’s power to change what only He can change.
Will you see things that surprise you? Yes. Will the enemy try to twist introspection into condemnation? He will. But resist the devil. “Taste and see that the LORD is good” (Psalm 34:8). Because the best way to see the goodness of God is to taste His intervention in our lives—to experience His mercy, His correction, and His transforming grace firsthand.
2026 won’t be extraordinary through grit or spiritual bootstrapping. There’s no lasting victory there. But when we invite God’s loving, close inspection—and respond in surrender—we walk into a year marked not by self-effort, but by grace, clarity, and real transformation.
May 2026 be an extraordinary year for you.
Happy New Year
Karl
P.S. If you’re looking for a meaningful way to launch into 2026, I want to personally invite you to join me for the T7R PowerPack Online on January 17. (Register here: T7R PowerPack | 180 Chicago Events) This is an online event, and there is no cost, though my hope is that you gain great value from it. It isn’t just another event to attend—it’s an intentional space to slow down, listen, and allow God to do the deeper work that sets everything else in motion. My prayer is that it helps you step into the new year with clarity, humility, and expectancy, and that it launches 2026 in a way you couldn’t have even imagined.