Last Year's Impossible List

It's a New Year!  Time to embrace all things new, make crazy resolutions, and look forward to what can possibly be in 2015 and beyond.  I really don't usually make resolutions.  I just know that I can never keep them perfectly (kind of like keeping the 10 Commandments is pretty impossible most days...if you really look at the heart of them), so the perfectionist in me says, "Why try when you will just disappoint yourself, Michelle?"

Well, this past year, I made a BUNCH of resolutions, but this time I intended to follow through on them.  All of them.  Here was my list, scrawled on the top of a set of sermon notes that I just found underneath a pile of papers at the foot of my bed:

1)  Stop feeling the pressure to perform or produce when I'm awake. (Thank you, Pastor Gregg, for this tidbit.  I have always struggled with this idea.)
2)  Be unselfish.  Serve others.
3)  Be uncluttered.  In my home and in my mind.
4)  Don't become a "mommy martyr." You know, someone who just complains about how hard it is to do what many of us have always said that we wanted to do -- be a mom.  ALL THE TIME.  Lamentations are perfectly acceptable...in moderation.  (I'm not talking about having a bad day.  I've had some doozies....I totally get those.)
5) Remember that "Christ in you [is] the hope of glory." Colossians 1:27 -- a verse I have never forgotten because my youth pastor, Michael, talked about this one on a Wednesday night, and I've never forgotten it.  My identity is in Christ.  Not as wife, mom, daughter, former teacher, minister's wife, etc.  While I am all of those things, they are not all of who I am.
6)  Hide God's Word in my heart.  Empty out the junk.
7)  Having some JOY & PEACE (it seems funny and a bit ironic that I wrote those in ginormous letters) and releasing that in those around me -- that last part was something that my brother, Travis, said to me at the beginning of the year.  Definitely worth pondering.

It's a pretty decent list.  And actually, I still hold to all of these thoughts, not necessarily as New Year's resolutions, but just as commitments to BE.  Of course, I don't keep them perfectly (I just found them in a pile of junk at the foot of my bed -- obviously #3 is definitely a struggle).  I just have to be okay with the fact that I cannot be perfect, but Christ in me IS the hope of glory and the source of anything and everything good in me.

But these ideas still sit in the back of my mind, probably because I have already been chewing on most of them for quite awhile.  And I continue to marinate in them this year.

But this year?  I've picked a word and a verse of the year.  Much easier to remember :)  I challenge you to do the same.