Forty years ago while pastoring in California I purchased a signed print of a painting at a street fair. The painting by Randy Klassen pictured a small child at a large church door. It spoke to me of my need for childlike faith no matter how many candles will adorn my next birthday cake.

Once framed, that picture has hung over my desk in every church I served for the past forty-five years. It traveled with me from California to Illinois to Washington State. Whenever my three daughters came to visit me in my church office, they could relate to the small figure standing in front of the enormous door. For them, as for me, it was a picture of how life’s circumstances often dwarf us.

I often wondered if there was an actual church that inspired the artist to paint this poignant scene. I never did reach out to ask. After learning of the artist’s death, I located an address for his wife and inquired of her. She told me it was some church in Evanston, Illinois. But which one? There were so many churches in this suburb of Chicago. I wondered if I’d ever find it. And then a Godwink!

Last October while in Evanston for my oldest daughter’s wedding, I was standing on the rooftop venue where the rehearsal was taking place. From my perspective I saw a castle-like church with an ornate steeple across the street. Following the rehearsal as I walked to my car, I saw the church sign. St. Mark’s Episcopal Church. And then I looked beyond the sign and saw the door to a small chapel connected to the larger church. Eureka! There in front of me was “the door.”

After forty years I had finally found the church door in the painting. Ironically, it was right across the street from the Time and Glass Museum where my little girl (now grown) would become a bride. The next day as I walked Kristin down the center aisle, I couldn’t help but ponder how quickly time had passed.

Wasn’t it just yesterday a five-year-old opened the church door to visit me in my office while I was preparing my Sunday sermon? Was it really twenty-five years ago that Kristin opened the front door of her college dorm to show me her freshman room? And then there was the door to another church Kristin opened for me so I could see the office where she worked. Yes, that familiar church door in the painting represents so many doors in my relationship with my firstborn.

But for me, the door in the painting represents something else. It also symbolizes the door of a new year at which we all now stand. It’s a new year that finds many of us feeling like the child in the painting. We are dwarfed by circumstances in our lives that render us weak and overwhelmed.

We enter into 2026 bracing for storms threatened by the current political climate and the unpredictable economic forecast. We are about to cross the threshold into a new year concerned about a doctor’s diagnosis, the security of a job, the stresses in a marriage or a loved one’s battle with addiction.

Issues that greet us at the entrance to a new year are like the dominating hills that surrounded Jerusalem three thousand years ago when David was king of Israel. In his journal he acknowledged the reality of his situation that found him questioning his security.

In Psalm 121 he wrote, “I lift up my eyes to the hills! Where will my help come from?” And then without even taking a breath, Israel’s monarch verbalized his faith. “My help comes from the Lord who made heaven and earth.”

Like the dominating influences that King David faced, we, too, have cause for anxiety and fear as we step into the coming twelve months. But we also have the means to exercise faith as we face the open door before us. And according to Jesus, we don’t need mountain-sized faith to move ahead with confidence. We only need the faith of a child to be able to look beyond the things that tower above us.

Guest columnist Greg Asimakoupoulos is a former chaplain at Covenant Living at the Shores in Mercer Island.