It's easy this time of year to fall into the "dream big, make resolutions, change everything" trap, isn't it? American culture tells us we get a new beginning, to choose our happy, to put ourselves first and make this OUR year. And for many of us, the prospect of NEW is enchanting. Particularly after years of Covid and culture wars and the challenges of parenting and putting the time we need to into our marriages, our jobs, our friendships, our kids.
It can be so tempting to try to warp the gospel to fit into that narrative that says if I make myself healthy, everything else will fit into place.
For a number of years I have LONGED for something to change. To not be so exhausted and chaotic and to stop operating in survival mode with our challenges.
But just this past year, I really sat down and asked the Lord why I was so tired. Why my scripture time was so empty. Why I didn't really want to pray. Why I felt exhausted and disheartened and, frankly, abandoned in our journey to help our two younger sons recover their own health.
And one day on a run, it came to me.
God hadn't changed, but I had.
I was trying to connect with the Lord the same way I did when I was 23. Before marriage. Before three children. Before a mortgage and the pressures of navigating medically complex kids, before my own struggle set in with PMDD, before miscarriage and infertility and two cross-country moves and family deaths....and...all the things that happen in 20 years of living life.
I had grown and changed and, with that, my needs and my rhythms for how and when to spend time with God had changed. I was so busy keeping to what I thought I knew to do that I ended up making God into my own image, an easy checklist, an empty to-do.
So I stepped back. It wasn't January. It wasn't when we are told to start new, dream big, change ourselves. It was a still, quiet morning when my body was tired and I just told God I missed Him. That I needed a new way, a new perspective, new habits and rhythms that match where I am as a 44 year-old mother, wife and coach pursuing a late-decided career in medicine. With all my wrinkles and scars and wounds and, yes, my resurrected places, too.
I can tell you confidently that God met me in that. I stopped trying to force a "quiet time" at an hour of the day that just didn't work with my family's rhythms. I leaned into new spiritual practices that I hadn't traditionally connected with, like breath prayers and stillness. I let the Lord into the grief in my life and learned how to breathe and process it and run less on rage and chaos and more on peace and hope and mindfulness.
That, my friends, is what a new year looks like. Not some big extravagant promise to change myself, but the quiet surrender to let God change me.
It's slow. It's up and down. But it's good. So when January hit six days ago, it wasn't much. Just another day that I woke up and tried to embrace that same new posture of surrender. The new rhythms, new breaths, new prayers, new hopes.
It's not easy to undo decades of perspective and practice, but it's sure worth it to try.
Blessings to each of you as we set off into 2023, full of whatever it will bring. Let us mark it with honesty, integrity and letting the Lord continue to mold us into who he has created us to be, not into what we can make ourselves apart from him.
