Happy New Year, Tangles readers! I hope the holidays have been good to you and your friends family, as they have been to me!

This time of year is not quite like any other, as it straddles the line of reflecting upon the past and looking forward to the future. Sometimes this experience can be filled with dread and lament, strangely mixed with hope and nostalgia. But just like the healthy person who learns from his or her past, both mistakes and successes, and can look upon it contentedly in order to forge a better future, we at Beneath the Tangles are excited to see what God holds in store from 2016 onward.

As you are likely aware, Beneath the Tangles has been undergoing a lengthy and comprehensive transition process. Over the past few weeks (and months, even) we have been moving our site to a new, independent hosting service. Just yesterday we announced that our podcast will be undergoing a significant transformation. We are overhauling and improving our infrastructure so as to provide an even better resource to our readers. In the future we may even be looking at a visual redesign. But in the midst of all these exciting changes, yesterday we said goodbye to the founder and visionary who made Beneath the Tangles what it is for more than five years.

But just as our founder, Charles, has left with both sadness and a sense of excitement, we, too, feel the conflicted feelings that accompany any significant change.

My name is JP, though you may know me as Japes or Japesland here on the site. I will be taking over Beneath the Tangles as the new administrator and editor-in-chief. While this is in many ways an exciting change to my role here, I fully acknowledge that I will never replace Charles in the capacity that he led the site for years. But that’s because we are two distinctly different people. And that’s okay.

Moving forward, my role at Beneath the Tangles will focus more on the administrative side of the website: building our community, growing the site, managing our finances, staying in contact with other websites, overseeing our writing staff, and, most importantly, ensuring that Beneath the Tangles stays focused on its God-driven mission. While I will still write from time to time, most of my work will be done behind-the-scenes, with our fully-skilled writing staff taking the reigns of providing you with quality articles on a consistent basis.

2016 is going to be an exciting year for Beneath the Tangles, and I can’t wait to announce some of our plans in the coming months. But more than that, I can’t wait to see how God uses this community, and I hope you feel that way, too!

featured image by SS@CP17 | reprinted with permission