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.

New Year's Resolutions

I always think about whether or not I want to do New Year's Resolutions each time the calendar creeps toward December 31. Some years I have made very concrete resolutions. Other years I've made more general ones like learning to accept myself and be me. I know of other people who've picked a word that they want to focus on in the next year, like "grace." I've also heard the idea of making an anti-resolution - stopping something you've been doing that's unnecessary. For example, "I resolve not to finish a book I'm not enjoying."

This year, I've decided to do things a little differently. I'm going to make 12 resolutions of daily habits - and focus on one per month. For example, floss, do yoga, write for 10 minutes, and so on. For the most part (other than the exercise ones), I'm trying to keep it to things that can be done in under 10 minutes. After all, most resolutions can make it for ONE month.

It takes 23 days to build a habit, so if it's something I want to continue to do daily that's an option. (The things I'd like to do that with are starred.) But I don't want to feel obligated to do that - after all, the compounded time of 12 things that take 10 minutes each is 2 hours a day! My main reasoning is, there are a lot of resolutions I could set, but if I try to tackle them all at once I'm setting myself up to fail.

Here's my list:

Jan - read devotional*

Feb - yoga* (*habit to form is some kind of exercise)

March - play keyboard

April - eat a fruit

May - run

June - play with dogs 10 minutes*

July - do a Spanish lesson 

August - floss*

September - blog*

October - play guitar 

November - write in my novel for 10 minutes

December - write appreciation letter

Planning a New Year

I entered 2012 full of hope and plans for what the year would hold for me. Dan had just moved out and I was optimistic about what my future would hold. And I had very specific plans in mind for my year.

Well, 2012 certainly did not disappoint in terms of my hopefulness and optimism, at least on a personal level. While the year was terrible for many friends who lost loved ones, and for my state as we faced numerous wildfires and the Aurora movie theater shooting, for me it was probably the best year of my life to date.

But the specific plans I had didn't come to pass the way I'd anticipated. I was so confident that these things would be a part of my 2012, when in fact God was ready to bless me in so many other ways.

2012 was a year of abundance. Tremendous healing and growth. Unparalleled closeness to God. A promotion. A facelift for my home. God's calling to new ministry areas. Looking back on the year, there's nothing in my life I'd change.

I enter 2013 a totally different person than I was a year ago. I'm so much more aware of who I am. I'm so much more aware of how to capitalize on my strengths and cope with my weaknesses. I've found the healing I was so hopeful 2012 would bring, and now I look forward with eager expectation to see what God will do with my repaired heart.

But unlike last year, I don't go in with specific plans. This year, my resolution is to simply wait and see what God is going to do—to take it as it comes whether or not I like it at the time. My resolution is to stop banking on my plans for my life—to not even make those plans. I trust his plans, and I know that all my planning doesn't amount to much anyway.

Over the summer God gave me these words: "Trust me" and "just wait." I want these words to be the theme of 2013. I want to trust God, rather than my own plans, and just wait to see what awesome things he'll do through me and with me.

2011 Resolutions

If you don't want to read this one, I totally understand. I just wanted to take the time to evaluate how I did with my 2011 resolutions.

General goals:

• See the good in everyone (my only non-measurable goal) I think I tried to do this pretty well.
• Read the other half of the Bible Finished 12/31/11!
• Write my next book Oopsies. Well I did write like 10 pages.
• Learn the mountain peaks viewable from Loveland I learned 2. The two obvious ones. 
• Read 5 or more classics (Ethan Frome, Old Man and the Sea, Frankenstein, The Time Machine, and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea) I started this. I read The Time Machine and started Frankenstein. I was so bored by both books that I decided to scrap this goal.
• Read 3 or more non-fiction books (Road to Reality, Captivating by Eldrege, The Me I Want to Be by Ortberg) Didn't read any of these.

Weekly goals:

• Blog at least 5x/week I wrote 166 blogs in the year. I was going pretty strong until April, when Buttercup passed away. That really knocked a lot out of me.
• Work out 3x/week In August I started running almost daily - I'd say most weeks I hit more like 5x a week!
• Write a devotional/week Again...going strong until April. Since my devotionals were originally inspired by Buttercup, and then I added the other dogs as inspiration, it was too painful to work on this. I picked it up again in November or so.

Monthly goals:

• Bake desserts instead of buying them at least once per month Umm...I like Oreos. And ice cream. And Grasshoppers. So this was a dumb goal.

Be

I decided to do something a little different for this year's resolutions. In the past few years I've set a bunch of tangible goals to achieve that year. And I've generally met or come close to meeting about half of them, which I count as success. It's more than I would've done without any goals.

But 2011 was a year of so many unexpected things, some good, many bad. It was a year of change. And as I thought ahead to 2012, I realized my plans don't come to anything without a steadfast devotion to God. I prayed last night, as I drove home from the bingo bash at work, that no matter what this year holds, no matter what I lose or gain, that God will help me go through it with faithfulness, endurance, and unswerving love for him.

And as I thought about what I want to accomplish this year, I didn't think of tangible, measurable goals. I thought about some of the blogs I've written lately and who I want to be. So these are my two resolutions:

Be you.

Be first.

The "be you" resolution relates to the blog I wrote a couple weeks ago, "Come Define Me." My sister has challenged me to embrace my pickiness. It's not a sinful thing, and it's a part of how God made me. And as my Come Define Me blog indicated, I've been thinking about a lot of ways I haven't been the person God created me to be, letting others define me instead. This year I want to work on letting God define me. That's not to say I won't work to change the sinful parts of me. But I want to embrace the person he made me to be. I want to embrace who I am in relation to who he is.

I love this quote from Rob Bell: "You be you. Don't be somebody else, we already have one of them." So that's what I resolve to do this year. Be me.

The "be first" one means I want to be first in the kingdom of heaven. I blogged about that recently, too. And when my nephew (age 4) was talking about wanting to be first this Christmas, I said to him, "You know what? Jesus had a secret for always getting to be first. You want to hear it?" His eyes lit up. "Yeah!"

"Put everyone else before you. Jesus sees it backwards. So if you put yourself last every time, you're really first!"

I want to be first where it counts this year. I want to lose my attitude of entitlement and serve God humbly, being last in this world so as to be first where it counts.