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.

Scripted

I've written before about my realization upon re-reading Psalm 139:16 that God is a better writer than me. But I'm seeing some ways God has helped me grow to more than just head knowledge of that.

There's this scene in the movie Must Love Dogs where John Cusack's character and his buddy are talking about women. And it goes like this.

"I think women have the whole thing planned. Really, the whole thing. An epic narrative in their heads. You know my theory about this? When you meet, they have the whole story written. But you don't get to read it. But if you go off script..."

"...right? They write you out of the story."

I saw that movie years ago and laughed at that dialogue because I recognized it as truth in my life. And I thought about it more recently as I reflected on how God is a better writer than me.

I used to have a script for my whole life. When I'd get married, what kind of job I'd have, when I'd switch to a different job, how each day would go...everything. Every aspect of my life was scripted out in my head, a carefully planned agenda (that never seemed to stay on script anyway). And I would do whatever I could to keep things on script.

And I recently realized it's been a long time since I've had a script. I mean sure, I plan out what I hope to accomplish in a day, but I don't try to foresee every little detail. I have no five-year plan. I have no one-year plan, even. I've always struggled with living in the present until one day I realized I was doing it! God changed me so gradually, so subtly, that I began to write less and less of my life script and leave that to him.

And that has led to a lot more peace and contentment than I ever had when I had a script.

I'm sure I'll face temptation to pick up my scripting pen again at some point (or several). But I hope when that temptation comes, this peace and contentment will help me keep the pen on the table and trust in God.

Editing

When I was in high school, my job was operating the shot clock at school basketball games. It was a pretty sweet gig and higher paying per hour than most high school jobs were. And it was a lot of fun.

But I noticed that when I would watch college basketball games on TV during high school and into my freshman year of college, my finger would twitch when the shot clock needed to be reset. My brain was so programed to hit that reset button that I did it without thinking—even when there was no button to press.

Fast forward to after college, when I worked for a church in the children's ministry. One part of my job was making the kids' bulletin, and that interfaced with my life, too. I'd look for new kinds of puzzles I could use when I was doing puzzles in my free time, and I couldn't get through a sermon without playing the bingo I'd created...and looking around to see how many kids were using the bulletin.

So it wasn't surprising to me that when I became an editor, it impacted the way I read. To clear up a common point of confusion, I'm a content editor. Although I do fix grammatical mistakes when I see them, my job is making sure content makes sense, fits our filters, and is the best it can be. I do a lot of critiquing, rearranging, and evaluating. Then we have an awesome team of assistant editors who polish it up and make it all consistent and grammatically accurate.

And I noticed almost immediately after starting my job that the speed at which I read books in my free time slowed waaaay down. Because I was constantly critiquing the order of things, and wondering whether the editor made the writer include that sentence...stuff like that.

But recently I realized that editing impacts my life in a far greater way than just the way I read books. And it's not good. I realized that I edit people. When I see someone I haven't met, when I hear someone talk, when I interact with someone...I realized that my brain is editing even then. I'm critiquing. I'm evaluating. I'm thinking of how to make what they do, say, or look like better for the setting.

It's really pretty terrible. It's presumptuous at best. But really...it's just plain sinful. Why am I editing something God made? I think he might know a little better than me. Maybe it's time to edit inward and learn to stop editing people.

Born to Write

I'm always fascinated to hear stories of how kids show their personalities at an early age, and how that connects to where they end up in life. And that includes my own reflections on childhood.

I didn't go to preschool; my mom helped each of us kids learn to read and write and such before we went off to kindergarten. And the thing I absolutely loved was my phonics workbook.

My sisters would get on the school bus in the morning and my mom didn't have any time to settle down before I would say, "Can we do phonics!?!? Can we do phonics!?!?" I was so eager to learn to read and write.

Now, I'm a writer and editor. I love thinking back on little 4-year old Ali begging to learn to read and write, and thinking about how God created me to do just what I do. He knew when he knit me together in my mother's womb that he was making me with a passion for words. He knew he was wiring me with a dose of creativity that he would use for his kingdom as I grew up to work for a Christian publishing company.

I didn't just fall into this job by coincidence. God created me with a specific purpose in mind, and that purpose was wired in me from early in my childhood. I couldn't wait to get started! It gives me goosebumps to think about how God has a purpose in mind for each of us and wires us to do just that.