Starting this New Year with a new blog.
I want to share with you for a few minutes my beef with ‘New Years Resolutions’. I hate them, don’t get me wrong I already made mine for this year. As I was listing the things that I want to accomplish for myself, my relationship, and my walk with God I couldn’t help but laugh at myself and think “why does a New Year make me fill inspired to do all of these things?” I could have easily started working out December 31st and it be just as efficient. The problem that I have with New Years Resolutions is that we wait until we have a New Year to better ourselves with different goals when truthfully we can start it at any day, like today. We wait until we begin a brand new year to create these resolutions and then when we fail to keep up with them, we just give up and say ‘well maybe next year’.
I want to say goodbye to New Years Resolutions and start creating goals for myself on a weekly basis. How many times have you wrote down “join a gym” or “read the Bible everyday” and then life gets busy and you forget all about that piece of paper labeled “New Years Resoltutions”? I can raise my hand and say I am completely guilty of this. I’m not saying no one should create resolutions. Some people are super disciplined and may completely disagree with me. But, if you’re anything like me and NOT super disciplined then you know resolutions just aren’t your thing... and that is okay! I mentioned earlier how I had already made my list of ‘resolutions’ a few of those include; love people well, spend more time in my quiet time, be more like Jesus, and my favorite one is to get out of my comfort zone.
I don’t just want this for 2019 - I want this for the rest of my life. I want to look back on this year and say this was the year that I started something big. This is the start of me telling myself, “I am going to do the things that scare me most, things that intimidate me, things that people around me told me I would never be able to do” not because I want to prove anything to a specific person or be able to say “I told you so” but to look back and say, not me but Him.
In the summer of 2018, I took an internship with a big church here in my hometown; Houston. What a leap of faith I took this summer. It was during this leap of faith where I conquered my biggest fear of public speaking. I had the best opportunity to speak in front of a couple hundred junior high students. If anyone would have told me at the beginning of the summer that I would have done this, I would have laughed and said “yeah right, there’s no way I could do that.” God took that as a challenge and said, well that is exactly what you’re going to do. And I did it. By the end of it I couldn’t get enough of it, I couldn’t wait for the next time I got to get up on stage and teach students more about the Gospel. God took the one thing that scared me most and made me fall in love with it. It had nothing to do with anything that I did but everything to do with what He did through me that summer. My encouragement to you this year is to allow this year to be the beginning of doing the things that scare you most. Don’t allow the end of a year to stop you from conquering many goals. If you mess up - start again, if you mess up again - start again. Don’t give up on the things you have set for yourself. Let the new year encourage you. Encourage you to be more bold or whatever goal you have been wantig to achieve. Take that and don’t give up on it.
I pray that this year is a time where you reflect on how far you have come and the places God has taken you. When you were so far deep in sin and didn’t think that you would ever see the light and God came and rescued you. Let God be your motivation this year and every year after that. You can accomplish far more than your New Years Resolutions when you allow God to move throughout your life.
