Happy New Year! Do you have a resolution? I do…
Ever since I graduated college almost seven years ago, I’ve been living as if I’m still waiting for my life to start. I don’t know if it’s because the career I prepared for never began, or because the family I expected to have never happened. The dreams of touring the globe in a worship band or moving to Scotland never materialized. Interrupted dreams can have a hard effect on a soul.
It’s like what the Oracle says to Neo in the first Matrix movie:
ORACLE
But you already know what I'm going
to tell you.
NEO
I'm not the One.
ORACLE
Sorry, kid. You got the gift but
looks like you're waiting for
something.
NEO
What?
ORACLE
Your next life, maybe. Who knows.
That's how these things go.
My desire for this year is that I will be here, in the present, right now, playing in active role in the life that God’s given me—living to bring glory to God in every moment, rather than floating along while I wait for “the Big Breakthrough”.
Like Oswald Chambers continuously says, you can’t wait for the crisis to happen in order to prove your character. In the same way, I can’t put off practicing my violin until the date when I’ll actually have a recital to do. I can’t put off my collection of Celtic tunes until my next trip to Scotland. I can’t put off singing and songwriting while I wait until I’m actually in a band again.
I need to be content with bachelorhood. Let me say that again, because it’s important.
My household, though it consists of just one person, must function as a complete whole. This means the things that I’ve been putting off my whole life, I can’t put off anymore, but I must take care of them now. For example:
- eating right,
- cooking real meals,
- housekeeping,
- exercising...
If there is any chore or goal or character trait that I’ve been putting off in expectation of it falling into place when I get married, I need to take care of it right now. If anyone has any other ideas, post some comments. I’d like to hear them!
I don’t want the next eight years to be as miserable as the last eight years have been. I cannot live the next eight years in waiting like I’ve lived the previous eight. I am so thankful for new beginnings, and I feel like the new year is a chance to start over.
So much of my personal outlook, when I’m walking around the hallways at church, going about my business, whatever, is haunted by the past. Failed dreams, personal moral failures, broken friendships, unwise financial decisions, church splits, etc.—things like these have a propensity to keep us chained down and prevent us from moving forward.
But the author of Hebrews exhorts us to “lay aside every weight” (Heb 12:1). Philippians 3:13-14 (ESV) says, “Brothers, I do not consider that I have made it my own. But one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.” This is what Bono was talking about when he penned “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For.”
Oswald Chambers said:
. . . God requires an account of what is past” ( Ecclesiastes 3:15 ). At the end of the year we turn with eagerness to all that God has for the future, and yet anxiety is apt to arise when we remember our yesterdays. Our present enjoyment of God’s grace tends to be lessened by the memory of yesterday’s sins and blunders. But God is the God of our yesterdays, and He allows the memory of them to turn the past into a ministry of spiritual growth for our future. God reminds us of the past to protect us from a very shallow security in the present. (My Utmost for His Highest, p. 366)
Let’s press on!