This New Year

The beginning of the year can be stressful. We wake up the first morning of January with fresh eyes. The new year is clean and crisp. The promises of a better year than the last is there for the taking. Stress enters in when we first ask the question, “can I actually do all that I hope to do?”

For me, stress comes in making resolutions. So, I tend not make them. This is not to say that I am devoid of goals. I am not. I have goals. I have things I wish to accomplish. And I suppose that making note of them is necessary. It helps to know what I have set out to do. 

So for a moment, this is what I’ll do. I’ll make my list. It is simple really. I intend:

• To continue to be active in my church
• To continue finding ways to simplify my life
• To continue exploring creativity in the form of writing, drawing and photography
• To travel back to England and visit with as many friends as possible
• To be outdoors more; hiking, camping and reviving the practice of the Sunday afternoon drive (more likely making the drive on Saturday though)
• To squeeze a few other out-of-state road trips into the year somehow

That is pretty much it. The idea of being a better husband, a better father and “papa”, a better son and brother, and a better friend; well, they are not resolutions. They are givens. Things I strive to do continually do not need to be set up or propped up as a goal. I like what Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “Love what is simple and beautiful. These are the essentials.” This list of intentions and those things I already do, are those things that are simple, beautiful and essential in my life. As I step into this new year, these are the things I hold before me.

Still there is something greater. The relationship I have with God and my desire to be in communion with Him is the most important thing that I do. It is a journey that I am on with the One who created me. It is a journey of yielding to Him so that He can define who I am and what is important to my life. C.S. Lewis once noted that “The more we let God take us over, the more truly ourselves we become - because He made us. He invented us. He invented all the different people that you and I were intended to be... It is when I turn to Christ, when I give up myself to His personality, that I first begin to have a real personality of my own.”  

I have started this year by throwing off some things; getting rid of some obligations that have weighed me down and distracted me from the things I am finding more important now. So this journey is one of discovery, or perhaps rediscovery. It is going deeper with God and redefining my personality in Christ. My prayer is that in finding this deeper relationship it causes me to go deeper in other areas of life. That I’ll plumb new ways of expression and find new appreciation of the things around me. That I’ll meet each day  having my eyes open and my spirit receptive to everything. But most important is that I’ll find new levels of relationship with those closest to me. 

Perhaps this seems too heavy to begin a new year. It isn’t meant to be that. I’ll lighten up in the weeks and months to come. Still it is a truthful way to begin. The journey through a year is so much more than a checklist of things to do, places to go or things to accomplish. That is part of it yes. But the journey through a year is one that should leave us better at the end of the trail than we were as we started out. 

That is my hope and my prayer.

That is the mark.