New Year's Resolution

Another year gone, one more started. It is amazing to me how one single day can make you rethink what you are about and what matters to you most. I have been deep in that struggle myself. What is ahead this year for me? How will it look different than last year? How does God want to use me?

This is a great opportunity to look back on the year and see all the areas that I could have grown in. To remember situations where I could have made a better decision. Unfortunately, I can think of tons of times when I chose the "easy way" instead of the right way. What I realize is that the easy way usually turns into the hardest way by the end. Choosing to to ignore the way someone treated someone else, or someone showing up late once or twice, or not having everything prepared ahead of time, or someone being passive aggressive too many times.

All these are situations are difficult, but they are essential to hit head on. If we don't, they mushroom into something even more difficult. My New Year's resolution is to speak the truth in love more often to everyone. This is the real "easy way". The challenge for me is that I need to have time to think about the situation. I am a processor. After the moment is gone, sometimes I can forget about what happened, so I need to learn how to follow up as soon as I have processed.

My other New Year's resolution is to stop sitting back and watching things happen. So many times this past year I have sat in the back of the room and critiqued how things were going instead of being involved in making them different. It is so much easier and sometimes more fun to just throw pot shots at people that are trying to lead instead of doing it yourself. At least they have the guts to stand up and try.

Theodore Roosevelt said it best: "It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat."

Happy New Year.