At the start of every new year growing up, we would prop our short legs up on the engraved chest in the living room and scratch out our New Years resolutions in our diaries. To minimize the angst we felt, our parents advised us to divide out into five main categories: Academic, Spiritual, Physical, Social, and Personal.
I switched from a Chinese Catholic girls school to a British international school in seventh grade. So for my goals that year, I had something like this:
Academic - Keep getting those grades
Spiritual - Pray every morning and night. Don't fall asleep during them.
Physical - Walk more. (Which meant that I walked
a ton around my dining room table while I was talking on the phone)
Social - Stop being a nerd ball.
Personal - Fall in love.
I had to make up for those lost co-ed years. We learned a lot about taking baby steps and tracking progress in goal-setting so I was prepared. I picked five boys to maximize my chances. A hello here. A smile there. All documented. I practiced winking and clicking my tongue simultaneously in the mirror (yeah. I actually did that. A lot.). But mainly, I just observed Chelsea and noted down how she flicked her hair, shifted her weight, while rolling one shoulder in as she cracked up at the boys' jokes.
Fortunately for my parents, I failed miserably at flirting.
Fortunately for me, I got a lot better in college.
---
While Alice got lost in her Wonderland, she asked the psychedelic Cheshire cat which path she should take. He replied lazily, "That depends where you want to go. If you don't know where you want to go, it doesn't matter which path you take."
My previous resolutions were very check list-esque. Ask more questions in early morning seminary. Make more eye contact. Learn Spanish.
My boss at work goes crazy if we ever submit performance targets that are activity-oriented and don't actually contribute to an important business outcome.
Create three power points this month.
Have a great attitude towards customer complaints. Similarly, I have let easily measurable quantitative goals satisfy me enough that I'm not demanding progress in what really matters.
Who do I want to become in 2013? In five years? Ten? Who do I want to be ultimately? Purpose in life determines what one does with her time, energy, resources, and ways of asking directions from the floating cat.
So now I am accountable in a whole different way. The ancient Jews not only sacrificed livestock to praise God, but they offered up their choicest lamb. Have I similarly given Him my
best 20 minutes of the day, when I am alert and thoughtful in my alone time with Him? Or did I just check God off my to do list?
----
New Years is seen as a cut off point for change. People are filled with hope for the better in January and guilt for the lapses in February. But in some way, every day constitutes an opportunity to do better. Even Jesus improved, between 12 and 30, and "increased in wisdom (academic) and stature (physical), and in favor with God (spiritual) and with man (social)" {Luke 2:52}.
The whole Christian religion is about change; not about where we have been, but where we can go with the help of Christ.
My uncle had always considered himself unlucky. He was born during the Great Famine when China starved in idealistic communes. He joined the military right before China reopened its universities after ten years of Cultural Revolution. He didn't drink, but he often exploded. During those lazy summer afternoons, my cousin would come scurrying down and hide underneath our beds while my uncle pounded out his string of failed marriages and businesses on the wooden door. A good man underneath, he searched desperately for change. Behind his locked door and papered window on the second floor were stairs that led to a small shrine dedicated to and smelling like whichever religion he was exploring at the time.
We invited him to church when he stayed with us for an extended period of time to help out with incoming baby Cody. But he would always prefer to hammer more nails into the elaborate storage system that he built for us while we were getting ready for church. One day while waiting at a stoplight in Central, the busiest district of Hong Kong, he pointed to a pair of young missionaries across the street and asked my mom who they were. She pulled him over to meet them and he was baptized shortly afterwards.
Young as I was, I couldn't miss the new light in his face and the genuine happiness in his eyes. He walked as a younger man, no longer bent over with regret and bitterness. He had found the change he needed.
We cannot stay the way we are and hope to become who we need to be.
If we have the hope that we can change, are we allowing the same hope for others to change? To say sorry? To grow?
-----
In the Bible, Lot's wife was warned not to look back at the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah and was turned into a pillar of salt because she didn't listen. When I was younger, I used to think that God must have needed a whole lot's wife of salt (bad pun), but I suppose it's really because she looked back
longingly.
President Holland gave a fantastic talk about how faith is always forward looking. Lot's wife was not ready to put down those things she needed out of her life and she was stuck facing the past.
And finally, some words from the apostle Paul, a man who epitomized change. He switched from being one of the most adversarial persecutor of the early Christians to their most fervent teacher and advocate. In Phillipians 3: 8, he says,
"Yea doubtless, and I count all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord: for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and do count them but dung, that I may win Christ."
He must have lost everything important to him. His prestigious position in the orthodox Jewish community. His friends. His family. His conviction of what he thought was right. They were
all things, but yet counted as dung, when compared to his newfound faith.
"Brethren, I count not myself to have apprehended: but this one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before.
I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus" (Phillipians 3:13-14).
And that is what a man who understands clearly his individual purpose in the grand plan, armed with his faith to move forward and courage to not look behind, can win.
{Excerpt from church talk on goals and resolutions}
