New Years, the Upside Down, and the Gospel

I’ve been watching Stranger Things…and I love it. The show is full of all the stuff that makes a show great for me. I’m only in season 4, so do me a forgiveness if I misinterpret anything to this point…but it’s got the goods. Suspense, 80s nostalgia, humor, character building, relationships, action, and a great plot. It’s also incredibly theologically rich (intended or not). But it got me thinking about the new year…and how every new year feels like standing at the edge of two worlds.

Behind us is what we know and maybe how we are known (habits, wounds, victories, regrets, etc). These are some of the patterns we swear we won’t repeat but often do, if we’re honest with ourselves. The calendar year gives us a moment of fresh breath. We look to the future into a calendar that is still blank enough to make promises feel plausible and resolutions obtainable. And somewhere in between is that strange, precarious moment where we sense that time itself is thin. Not empty and void. Thin. Translucent and almost bursting.

Scripture has a word for this: “kairos”. Not chronological time, but pregnant time (time full). “Now is the favorable time,” Paul says. “Now is the day of salvation” (2 Corinthians 6:2). Not because the clocks and years reset, but because God is always doing something now within the framework of our standard of measurement for the days (time). Time is always bursting into something, right-side-up or Upside Down.

If I’m honest, the new year often feels less like a fresh start and more like an episode of Stranger Things.

Because we don’t just step forward into something new, we carry the Upside Down with us.

The Upside Down is not another world in the cosmos and separate from ours. That’s what makes it terrifying. It’s a distorted version of the same one. Same streets, houses, and faces. But something is off and corrupted…parasitic is a great word to use for it. What should give life now drains it. What should protect now threatens and thrives in the distortion.

Not surprisingly, Scripture has language for this too.

Paul says creation is “subjected to futility” (Romans 8:20). John says “the whole world lies under the power of the evil one” (1 John 5:19). Genesis names it earlier still: the ground itself is cursed; not destroyed, but bent and distorted into something similar to the original. Eerily familiar, however dark and foreign. Like a memory of something that used to be but isn’t, where we get glimpses of what was in the present.

That’s the Upside Down.

And here’s the harder truth: we don’t just visit the Upside Down, we carry it inside of us and with us.

The gospel is very explicit about this. Sin is not merely bad behavior; it’s disordered desire. It’s good things twisted. Love curved inward. Power detached from purpose. Purpose without meaning. Images made without identity. Augustine called it incurvatus in se “the soul bent in on itself.”

That’s why resolutions fail. We try to renovate the surface while the vines are still growing underneath the walls. The foundation hasn’t been modified, but we throw a fresh coat of paint on like a cheap land lord.

But here’s where the gospel refuses to allow the Upside Down win.

In Stranger Things, the turning point is never when someone becomes stronger than the darkness. It’s when someone crosses over. When love enters the Upside Down and refuses to leave. When someone risks contamination to rescue another. True love abandons the idea of normalcy and safety at the expense of the other.

That’s Christmas theology bleeding into the new year.

“The Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (I know I quote this a lot, but it’s awesome). Not adjacent to us, nor somewhere above us. Rather, among us (with). God does not shout instructions from the right-side-up world. He enters the distortion. He breathes its air. He lets it bruise Him. He doesn’t operate with behavior modification as the end goal. He operates with transformation and restoration and the desired ends.

Jesus doesn’t avoid the Upside Down of our world; He invades it.

He steps into sickness, shame, violence, and even death. He touches lepers. He eats with traitors. He absorbs betrayal. And finally, He descends fully into the grave itself. Without pause, He rushes in to do the work only He can do for a creation that He loves and longs for.

“The light shines in the darkness,” John says, “and the darkness did not overcome it” (John 1:5).

Not “could not touch it.” It doesn’t say “did not wound it.” But titillating phrase appears: “did not overcome it.”

That matters as we cross into a new year.

Because the gospel does not promise a year without darkness. It promises a darkness without dominion. Where light shines regardless and darkness has no power.

Resurrection does not erase the scars of the past; it redeems them. The risen Christ still bears wounds (John 20:27). Which means the Upside Down does not get the final word over your story. What has tried to claim you becomes the very place Christ meets you. That, my friend, is very Good News.

And this is where hope becomes active, not sentimental. Where we see the Word in action, Christ doesn’t play a passive role in our lives.

Romans 8 doesn’t end with escape. It ends with groaning, an aching. Creation groans. We groan. And with a wonderfully surprising twist, the Spirit groans with us. The Christian posture toward the future is not denial, it’s defiant hope. A hope that stands within the Upside Down and roars with grit and meaning. A hope that looks at decay and still says, “Something is being born here., even still.”

The new year is not a clean slate. It was never meant to be. It’s a contested one. A time to reimagine what was and image (yes image) what can and should be in the One in whom we find our identity.

And the gospel insists that Jesus is already there. Waiting in the strangeness and unknown…in the Upside Down.

He stands at the thin places between years, between worlds, between who we were and who we are becoming, and He says what He always says with excitement and passion:

“Behold, I am making all things new” (Revelation 21:5).

Again not “I will.” But the resounding; I am. Actively doing and being.

So we step forward; not naïve and fearless, but faithful, because He is faithful.

We bring our whole selves, the right-side-up and the Upside Down, trusting that resurrection has a way of leaking into even the darkest versions of our lives. Its vines reach further and deeper than anything else imaginable. Extinguishing what used to be and bringing beauty from ashes.

And somehow, mysteriously, gloriously, and dare I say maybe even supernaturally…the place where we thought God was absent becomes the place where He was most at work.