I hope everyone was able to ring in the New Year in peace and comfort, whether that was curled up with a good book, partying with friends, or out celebrating with the crowds. I was in New York City for the holiday, but I didn’t go to Times Square (and you must know, only tourists ever go to Times Square), but enjoyed dancing and watching fireworks with a circle of family members in Brooklyn. And back at home in California, I took the first available chance to begin 2016 right by attending a yoga class – and found not a single parking spot available within two blocks of my gym. Ah, yes, it’s New Year’s, the time to beat ourselves up over what we have not accomplished yet! As a nation we all commit to communally punish ourselves with diet, exercise, other work masquerading as “hobbies,” and other such high and lofty goals, set up strictly for the month of January, and generally abandoned at least by midway through February. What’s your New Year’s resolution?
I know I can’t say anything to rescue you from the overwhelming tide of Shoulds, Musts, Guilts, and Shames, but let me offer a bit of an alternative. Even at the same time as you set, focus, refine, and try to keep your New Year’s resolutions, can you also have a New Year’s prayer? That is, while you give yourself a long list of goals, can you give God at least one request? I ask this because crowded gyms and diet plans of January all serve to highlight the illusion that we can do it by ourselves. We can be beautiful, active, healthy, successful, and more — if only we throw our shoulders in and push with all our might.
The truth is that not everyone who tries succeeds; not everyone who exercises looks like a model; and not everyone who goes vegan ends up living to a ripe old age. The world we inhabit is cruelly unfair, and effort does not reliably correlate to outcome. We don’t always get the good things we deserve.
The other important truth is that we are not alone, and that sometimes, mysteriously, by God’s grace, we get far better than we deserve. Sometimes the one who asks, receives, and for the one who knocks, the door opens. And I would hate to think that I had robbed myself of God’s gifts, simply because I was trying to earn them, rather than to simply ask.
If you have a minute right now, think about 2016, your goals, your resolutions, and your hopes. Can you take one of those hopes or goals, and rather than resolving to do it yourself, can you choose to ask God for help? You don’t have to actually stop working on it, but you DO have to re-word it and to remember that not everything is accomplished by brute force.
I pray that we all may know the security of God’s grace that surrounds us; that our work may be purposeful and meaningful; and that our resting and receiving may be richly blessed.
Happy New Year!
Talitha