Goodbye and Hello

Goodbye, 2004!

I prepared to celebrate the transition to the new year this evening by thoroughly cleaning my refrigerator. How prosaic is that? Not very exciting, maybe, but very satisfying. It needed it! Now I will start the year with a fresh and clean refrigerator - no questionable mold projects in the back corner, no outdated bottles, no sticky spills on the shelves. A clean beginning for the new year.

I wish it were that easy to clean out and change many other things in my life, as I say goodbye to the old year and hello to the new. Do you make New Year's resolutions? I don't have a formal system for myself, but I do take this time to ponder ways that I want to do things differently in my life.

It's only been in the last few years that I've allowed myself to make New Year's Resolutions. Most of my life I considered New Year's Resolutions too ordinary, too limiting, too old-fashioned, too cliche. I told myself that I was constantly evaluating the important things in my life - and I didn't want to participate doing so at the New Year when most of our culture was doing it, only to forget about their resolutions within a few weeks.

A few years ago I had to admit to myself that most of my attitude about this was a combination of pride and fear of failure. I secretly wanted to consider myself superior to a culture that went through the ritual of new resolutions every year, and at the same time afraid that I would just fail at resolutions I made anyway.

So now I try to actually make some New Year's resolutions. If I fail at keeping them, I figure it will be another opportunity for me to experience God's grace. I haven't thought this through very well this year, but here are a couple of mine:

1. Keep a more regular schedule. I need to sleep more regularly, going to sleep and getting up at fairly regular times, and getting enough sleep. Without this discipline, I'm not sure that I can follow through on any of my other resolutions.
2. Pray more regularly, especially finding time for quiet listening. This has been really lacking in my life. I also hope to pray the offices regularly, by visiting the Northumbria Community website most days.
3. Eat more healthily, and cook healthy food for my family. Today I sent in an application to become a member of a local farm's Community Supported Agriculture program. They deliver weekly boxes of organic produce that we can pick up at a house right near my daughters' school, and I look forward to when their season starts in March. I hope to also share a fun and educational experience through this with my daughters, and visit the farm where our food is grown.
4. Exercise more. I tried to visit the "ladies only" gym this afternoon that I had joined many months ago and hadn't visited for a long, long time. I thought that instead of going in to quit as I had planned, I would find out the hours and try again to go regularly. Only - when I went today, I found that they had closed their doors a few days ago. So I'm still not sure how I will exercise more. I will probably just try to walk regularly (it's definitely cheaper), but I don't have much confidence that I will follow through with this discipline. This will be one of my prayer topics, I think!
   

There are so many other things that I want to change in my life, to do differently. I think, though, that many of them would flow out of these disciplines, or at least be easier based on them. I have many other goals that are more qualitative than quantitative - be more full of grace with my children and less busy and short-tempered, to live a simpler life, to be more open to God's voice and leading in my life. There are also some very real needs in my family's life for direction and provision, and even more practical things like the need to lose some weight and clean my house.

This year, though, I think that I will try to commit to these four underlying disciplines, and see if I can follow through with them regularly. I'm not sure if I'm focusing on the right things here, but one of my prayers will be to ask God to show me how to change that focus, if I should. I'll admit to a fair amount of skepticism that I will be able to keep these resolutions - but I want to give it a go, to try for a clean start.

Hello, 2005!