The Year in Review: A Family Reflection Practice
When my husband was growing up, his family moved a lot. His parents are missionaries, and his dad is also an academic, and in the course of their work, they lived in several countries in central Africa, in France, and in a handful of US cities. Their lives could look very different from year to year, and sometime around when my husband was in high school, they started a family practice called the Year in Review.
It’s pretty much just what it sounds like. The family gets together, either on squishy couches in the same living room or on Zoom, reviews the year, and reflects on hopes for the upcoming year. Part of what I love about the Year in Review is that it combines individual reflection with a collective check-in on how things are going within the family. Given our geographical distance–at one point, we had people participating from Washington state, Texas, New Jersey, and Florida–it’s meaningful to hear what’s been going on in everyone’s life and to set some intentions for the family to stay connected over the upcoming year.
I’m not sure if they started this way, but by the time I joined the Schrag family, the reviews lived in a series of Google docs. Each year, someone would set up a table with rows for each person to review their hopes, plans, and/or goals from the past year’s document, to make a list of other significant events from that year, and to share some hopes, plans, and goals for the following year.
This is more-or-less what a new Year in Review table looks like. We copy the right-most column with goals from the previous year’s document into the first column for the current year, then annotate those with some brief self-evaluations.
You can find a template Google doc like the one in the image above here.
Over the past eight years, the number of family members has doubled. The cozy, contemplative, child-free hour of communal, silent Google doc editing over New Years–my first experience of the Year in Review, or close enough–has given way to predictable chaos. I’m one of the new arrivals, along with my brother-in-law and five grandkids, so the Year in Review has gotten logistically complicated. Now everyone fills out their personal row ahead of time, and then over a couple of Zoom calls, each person shares highlights from their reflections and goals for ten or fifteen minutes. Once we’ve gotten through the individuals, together we fill out rows with the same three columns for the family as a whole and for the world (this last is always…aspirational). Usually we pray at the end, offering our hopes up to God and trying to be open-handed with them.
My in-laws have modeled the Year in Review as a Christian spiritual practice. Though Christian commitment looks different among family members and individual’s faith practices have changed over time, I think it’s fair to say that we all more or less share a desire to live more like Jesus and with Jesus. You’d have to ask each of us what that looks like for us as individuals, but the values of loving God and loving our neighbors motivate our Year in Review reflection and goal-setting. If other families or groups wanted to do a similar practice, having a shared set of values–however broadly defined, Christian or not–could offer some meaningful cohesion.
The Year in Review has added many layers of significance to my relationships with my husband’s family, and there are three I want to mention here.
The first is a unique form of accountability. Because we go pretty deep with the Year in Review, we have a lot to talk about and keep up with as the year unfolds, either when we see each other in person or catch up at a distance. And occasionally, we have surprising moments of synergy. One of my sisters-in-law did The Artist’s Way with me this past summer, and it was a really cool way to stay connected that I doubt would have happened without the Year in Review.
The second is a space to celebrate and grieve together. The family has experienced a lot of tough things over the past several years–the passing of all four of my parents-in-law’s parents, my husband, kids and I getting covid and missing my sister-in-law’s wedding, hard diagnoses. There has also been so much joy–graduations and weddings and babies and long-cherished dreams coming to fruition and time with each other and extended family. It feels therapeutic to have a space where we mark those things together.
The third is a deep family archive. Especially in a season where I have a hard time remembering last week, let alone five years ago, it feels like a great reality check to have these annual core samples we’ve taken that reveal layers of individual and family history. It’s not a perfect record, of course, but it captures where we have been in a way that pictures can’t. Since I started participating eight or nine years ago, my parents-in-law have started a fund to promote the incorporation of local arts within ongoing Bible translation projects, and my sister- and brother-in-law went from doing campus ministry to starting a beautiful farm and market with the hope of facilitating the health and healing of the earth and their local community. Would those huge life projects have happened without the Year in Review? Probably. But because of the Year in Review, I have been able to walk with them through their processes in a way that has allowed me to learn a lot and have closer relationships to them. And the archive helps us to remember that those processes have often been messy and painful. My father-in-law wrote this moving poem with the refrain, “Do hard things that take a long time.” The Year in Review dignifies those hard things by giving them the space and time they need to blossom into something meaningful, something that no prediction or goal at the beginning of a new year can fully capture.
I feel really blessed to have close relationships with both my family and my husband’s family. This kind of practice would not work for everyone. If you have family members that you can’t safely be vulnerable with, this practice could be extremely hurtful. But if you have a group of family members or friends that could use a moment to reflect and check in with each other, especially who are committed to each other for the long haul, it’s a practice I can’t recommend highly enough.
