Viewing 2026 Through a Different Lens

January is a natural moment for looking ahead. As the year turns, we pause between what has been and what might be. We look forward, but never from a blank slate. Our hopes, fears, and expectations are shaped by our experience.  The question is not whether we look to the future through a lens, but which lens we choose. This choice echoes a deeper truth found in one of the great stories of the last two centuries: Les Misérables. Many of us have seen the stage musical, based on Victor Hugo’s classic tale of post-revolutionary France. At its heart stand two unforgettable characters, Jean Valjean and Inspector Javert, whose contrast offers a striking reflection for the start of a new year. 

Jean Valjean begins imprisoned, four years for stealing bread to feed a starving child, and fourteen more for trying to escape. His sentence unfolds under the relentless gaze of Javert, whose life is ruled by a rigid sense of justice. On release, Valjean, destitute and desperate, steals silver from a priest who has welcomed him, and when caught, he expects to be returned to prison. Instead, the priest forgives him and even gives him his cherished candlesticks. To the hardened Valjean, shaped by years of cruelty, this act of mercy is bewildering. It becomes the moment that changes everything. He breaks parole, changes his identity, works hard, and eventually becomes a respected mayor and factory owner. But his life never becomes a tidy ascent. The future, for Valjean, is never predictable. Time and again, he chooses the path of love and sacrifice over safety and advantage. He reveals his identity to save an innocent man. He spares the life of his relentless pursuer, Javert. And he risks his own life to save the young revolutionary who will capture his adopted daughter’s heart. Valjean faces the world as it unpredictably unfolds, he looks ahead through a lens shaped by faith, mercy, and love, a lens that expects mystery and welcomes it. 

Javert, by contrast, is unwavering. His decisions flow from strict logic. Justice, as he understands it, is a straight line: clear, constant, and unsentimental. One of his memorable songs in the musical shows Javert looking across the city at night, comparing the moral order he trusts to the fixed stars above. He sings of certainty: “He [Valjean] knows his way is dark, but mine is the way of the Lord… Stars, filling the darkness with order and light, you know your place in the sky, you hold your course and your aim.” For Javert, life holds no mystery, only rules. He is convinced Valjean can never be trusted or changed. His whole future is mapped out by the certainty of his own judgment. 

Our modern world often resembles Javert’s confidence. We are told that the mysteries of life are all being solved and the remaining unknowns are simply problems awaiting better logic, data, and technology. The past is catalogued; the present is measurable. The future will be manageable if we can just calculate it correctly. In this view, the world becomes a place to control rather than a mystery to enter. 

But Les Misérables pushes back. Javert cannot understand Valjean’s compassion. It doesn’t fit the neat lens through which he views the world. Yet he recognizes something undeniably good in Valjean. In one of the most haunting moments, Javert sings: “Can this man be believed? Can his sins be forgiven? Shall his crimes be reprieved? And must I now begin to doubt, who never doubted all these years?” In that moment, he encounters mystery, not as a threat but as grace, and his certainties collapse. The stars, he says, are “black and cold.” 

At the beginning of a new year, most of us feel the tension between the Valjean and Javert ways of seeing.  So, it is worth asking ourselves: through which lens am I looking?  The Valjean lens that hopes, forgives, and believes renewal is possible or the Javert lens that longs for control, clarity, and a predictable future. Les Misérables, like the Gospels, reminds us that life is not a puzzle to be solved nor yet a set of certainties to be defended. Mystery and mercy weave through our days in ways we cannot fully explain, yet they remain real all the same. 

At the end of the story, both men die. Javert is swallowed by the darkness he cannot reconcile. Valjean, by contrast, dies in the arms of his beloved daughter. The musical closes with a vision of hope: those who have fallen in the struggle for freedom and justice stand on a great barricade, a clean and beautiful Paris at their feet. Wounds are healed, songs of peace rise, and heaven’s light is warm and generous. In that place, there is no tension, no muskets, and no Javert.