2014 and 2015

2014 is over, and I have to say that my method of making 12 resolutions, 1 per month, did not pan out well. I thought it would be a good way to break things down into smaller goals and give myself a more frequent checkpoint to refocus on my goals...but it just didn't work out that way.

2014 was a pretty good year for me. The biggest thing was that I'm getting my first book published! It's been a dream of mine since I was maybe five or six years old to publish a book, and this April I had a proposal accepted, and the book shipped to the printer a couple weeks ago! Wildly Creative Puzzles With a Point releases on February 10 this year, and I hope it will be an awesome resource to help kids who love puzzles discover more about their faith.

I've always loved puzzles, but I've seen them used in such wasteful ways in the church (and schools). They're not meaningful; they're time fillers. But I didn't believe they had to be. Wildly Creative Puzzles With a Point re-imagines how puzzles can be used in church to help kids discover the Bible...not simply regurgitate facts.

Anyway...that's my plug and my biggest accomplishment for 2014. Otherwise it hasn't been a very eventful year...but that's a good thing. I'd hoped to be ringing in the new year with a new house, but that fell through, so I'll continue the hunt.

For 2015, I did make some resolutions/goals. One is I want to work on writing a novel by writing for just 10 minutes a day, at least 5 days a week.

I also have been working for the past probably 8 or so years writing a devotional inspired by my dogs, with a goal of writing 101 devotions. I hit that number at the end of last year, so I'd like to go through the whole thing and check for repeats, write any more I need in order to replace repeats, polish it up, and submit it to some possible publishers.

I'd also like to open an Etsy shop to sell my crafts.

So really, two of the three aren't habits to form/break, they're just things I want to accomplish at some point in the year. Because really, when I started thinking about resolutions, I started thinking that maybe I'd rather focus on who I want to be than what I want to do in 2015.

And I think the main thing is, I want to be useful. Recently I've been feeling so small, like I see so much wrong with the world and I'm not doing much about it. And I know I can't fix everything. But like the proverbial starfish, I want to make a difference to one person at a time. And as I think about what I can do, my passion for writing comes to mind. And I think if I can let God use me to write and help people, that's what I want to do.

So that's what informed my "resolutions." I want to be useful. I want to give more than I take. I want to seek to understand and empathize rather than to judge. I want to be a grace-filled person. At the end of the year, will I be able to measure how I did? No. But measurement is what doing is about—not what being is about. So, measurable or not, that's who I want to learn to be in 2015.