New Year--Starting Over

Instead of resolutions, many people and journals are enticing all of us to set goals.  Goals are much better.  Goals require a plan.  Goals require action.  Goals require steps laid out in a plan that when they take action, they are attained.  As I sit here on this first Sunday of the year, I have come to realize that I have lived far too long in my past and haven’t advanced to the present and future because I failed to plan.

I’ve started every New Year and in the last twelve years, every school year with goals and resolutions to change behaviors from the past year.  I wrote down a list of what I wanted to do, but I never took the time to write down the steps to reach those goals.  So, every year, I failed.  I continued to practice the same habits that I had formed.  I struggle with planning and organizing.  It took me years in youth ministry and years in teaching to practice the importance of planning and organization.  It’s a real struggle for me.  Even though I plan and organize, I still manage to leave something off the list, but I can fit it back in easier because it’s not that big of a crisis.  The excuse of not being organized is gone.  I have purchased a guided planner for the past three years that has reformed my year and goals are set and have been met. 

The same works with life.  If we live in the past, we don’t change our present or future.  How do we move forward?  We plan.  We plan how to manage a situation, and our response to an event. We look for opportunities to thrive instead of fail.  We take small steps and realize that it will take time to reach our ultimate goal. 

I dream big.  I dream “wide awake” as my pastor encouraged me twelve years ago when I first stepped into Mosaic.  Once I turned those dreams into goals and started step-by-step moving forward, my life changed for the better.  I can’t just sit around and dream.  I have to live and make it happen.

It’s time.  It’s time to throw off the past of what is hindering us and blanket ourselves into the future.  The only way to be new is to practice new things.  “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; old things have passed away; all things have become new.” 2 Corinthians 5:17 (NKJV) We have to live in the new in order to succeed.  We cannot continue to look at the past and allow our mistakes or bad habits to infiltrate our present.  It takes time to throw off a bad habit, and it takes time to start a new habit.  Take the time and take one habit at a time.  I have to remind myself of this every day.  We can start over every day.  We don’t have to wait for the New Year or a new school year.  Every day we get a new start.  The first step is to let go of the past.