Well, as the Lord God explicitly laid out for me, 2013 was a ‘year of pain’, 2014 would be a ‘year of recovery’ and 2015 is expected to be a ‘year of gain’.
The first two have played out exactly perfectly to a tee.
2015 is a mysterious mystery which lies before me and I’m like a man about to enter a corn maze…
And that’s why faith is so exciting.
I don’t really have anything inspiring to say because I’m not an inspiring person, however, what I do know is that the flip of the calendar number is a great time to make sure we have looked both behind us and before us.
For me, what I have done in an unstructured way, was do a quick synopsis of the year behind me and set some basic goals for the year ahead of me. Unfortunately, however, that was fun but some of the future stuff didn’t pan out. Some of that is obviously out of my control while some of it was.
This year, what I thought I would do is structure it a bit. Break down this short life into a few categories and see how I’m scoring. Feel free to take the backbone of the structure and tailor it to your life. Mine will be God-heavy where yours may be ‘something else’ heavy. Here are the categories that I have come up with and I’d love to get other suggestions if you have any:
- Spiritual
- Marriage
- Family
- Friends
- Financial
- Business/Job
- Knowledge/Education
- Health (oh yeah! Health!)
A thought I also just had was that success in each category in the above list could already be linked directly to the ol’ YMCA Canada slogan that my dad taught me (and that I didn’t verify until searching right now and confirming with this link) of
Body – Mind – Spirit
If you apply these three to all categories you should prosper, I’m thinking (assuming it’s the right ‘spirit’ otherwise you’re hooped). It would be interesting to put together a ‘holistic survey’ for this time of year where you grade yourself in each of these categories with very pointed questions. For example, under ‘marriage’ you might have to answer a questions like:
- What grade would you give yourself out of 10 for how much you loved your husband/wife?
- What grade would your husband/wife give you out of 10 for how much love you showed them?
Etc.
You can see how this might be both painful and useful at the same time….
For now, since I’m out of time and didn’t come up with the idea soon enough, perhaps we could collaborate and come up with a little something for next year. Nothing wrong with doing this any time in January, either.
Can I get an amen, someone?
I’ll amen myself.
Happy New Year!
