So, here I stand, on the precipice of a new year. I’ve thought (and probably said) before how hard it is for me to write “Christmas” letters and address a new year. I always seem to say something along the lines of “We have no idea what the new year will bring…” and well, we don’t!
I feel like all to often we rush ahead, we charge forward, bulldoze our way into what we set our plans as. Either that or we are a leaf on the river of life blithely going wherever we go, with no real dreams or goals of our own. There is a problem with both scenarios.
If we push our way into whatever we want, just push on no matter what, odds are high that we are missing what God truly has planned for us – and usually there are consciences to this. If we shove and bully our way toward our goals without stopping to look around, to make sure that our goals line up with God’s goals, sooner or latter He is going to catch us and say – “I wanted you to go that way, and I wanted you to do it a while ago, so now that you’ve built this highway in the wrong direction I’m going to bring you back”. This results in our lives “crumbling around us” because we built those lives, and did it with little regard to the life God was trying to build.
On the other hand, if we simply float along with life, how do you accomplish anything? My friends are all doing X, so I will too… My family expects Y, so I guess that sounds good. My job wants to promote/move/”redistribute”/fire/give me a raise OK that works. I’m sorry but that seems a listless way to go through life. God has great plans for you, but odds are He isn’t going to just gently lead you around to accomplish His goals. Nope, He’s going to wait for you to show up and say “OK God, what’s next?”
So, I’ll set some goals for myself, Chris and I will set some for our lives, for our family, for our jobs. We will look at 2015 with guarded optimism, and then we will start to walk slowly in the direction of our dreams. We will pray, we will listen, and when we get those feelings of “maybe we should think about this instead” we will stop and pray harder. Trust me when I say we have BIG plans for 2015, and those plans are going to mean a LOT of change in our family. Also believe me when I say those plans look NOTHING like what they looked like a year ago – or even six months ago. So honestly, if I stand at the edge of 2016 and life looks totally different from what I have in my head right now, I will not be at all surprised. I can tell you what we hope and want it to look like, I can even tell you our plans to make it look the way we want it to. What I can’t tell you is what God has in mind for the coming year, how that will be different from my plans, from our goals. So I haven’t a clue what may actually happen.
I’ve gotten to a point where it’s even kind of hard to share openly what OUR plans are, because well, inevitably that’s not what happens, because our view is short and limited, and Gods view is vast and eternal. It’s hard to look at the goals we had a year ago, to finish the house and make it salable, to move and realize the dream of a mini-farm for our family. Now that dream is back to being a dream, a want for me to leave this house and settle somewhere else. God knows my heart, He knows what I want, but He also knows more than that. So, we aren’t moving to the country, we may not be moving at all, but that’s because God is shifting us to another path, honestly it’s a road I thought was closed – but maybe not.
So, I’m off to make the most of what is left of 2014, as I wonder what in the world it is that God has in store for the coming year.