Time to Restart

We are now a month into the new year and many of the well-intended resolutions have already bit the dust. New Year’s celebrations consuming mouthwatering snacks, and the left-over holiday sweet treats, when coupled with binge watching football games, has left our dietary intentions in shambles. Eating healthy is but a mirage. Losing pounds we acquired this past year is but a figment of our imagination. In fact, it seems our girth has grown! The exercise program we envisioned remains in the planning stages. We only have gotten as far as buying the exercise clothes, Googled exercise programs, and collected excuses as to why we should wait for more appropriate weather to start this process.

     U.S. News & World Report reported some disappointing findings about resolutions. They revealed, “By the second week of February, some 80 percent of those resolutioners are back home with a new kind of remorse staring back at them in the mirror — the remorse of disappointment.” Great expectations embedded in our resolutions often only yield great exasperations! There are certainly many reasons for this happening. Psychology Today suggests that there are some contributing factors to this lack of success. They propose that there are “… four common ways you are standing in the way of your success… Your goals aren’t clear… You feel overwhelmed. You feel discouraged… You’re not ready to change.” It appears there are more barriers blocking our resolutions than there are bridges to our success.

     With this disappointing news it probably comes as no surprise that many have determined such intentions are futile and simply say, “Why bother?” On one website (discoverhappyhabits.com) they share a plethora of statistics concerning resolutions that they amass and update from year to year. They reported that only “31% of survey participants plan on making resolutions for 2021 while 19% are still undecided.” It appears that a majority of people have concluded, “Why create undue frustration? I’ll just forgo this whole process.” In that same website they discovered that about “one in 10 people who failed said they made too many resolutions.” In essence they spread themselves too thin. They tried to address all the issues needing to be tackled. Their divided attention was such a distraction that they failed in their goals.

     One biblical character who I admire is the Apostle Paul. He had a healthy way to look at life and this enabled him to accomplish much. He was a preacher, a church planter, a theologian, a disciple maker, a defender of the Christian faith before the secular world, an encourager and exhorter of people, and a traveler throughout the Roman world. He expended tremendous energy and effort (2 Corinthians 11:23-28) to carry out the mission he believed he was given by Jesus Christ. In Philippians 3:12-14 he shared the philosophy energizing his life. While he did many things, he was single focused “this one thing I do.”

     How did he carry out that single focus? First, he did not see himself as having arrived. He knew he had lots of growing to do to be all that God wanted him to be. Too often a person thinks so highly of themselves that they do not consider that there is room for improvement. Such an individual will be slow to make changes, if they are even willing to make them at all.

     Second, he did not focus on his past failures or successes. When our focus is on failures of the past we can be weighed down in discouragement. Focusing upon successes may cause one to think there is no more to accomplish. Paul focused ahead and envisioned how God might work in him. Such a forward-looking vision keeps one seeing the future as the place of potential as one moves ahead.

     Third, he realized that energy must be merged with vision for the future. He says he was “straining forward to what lies ahead.” Too often great intentions die because energy and effort are not propelling us in the direction we believe we need to go. I remember watching the salmon in Alaska expending great effort to swim upstream in the mighty current of the Copper River to their spawning grounds. They were motivated to lay their eggs and produce the next generation of salmon. If I saw a salmon floating downstream with the current, I knew it was dead. It takes a live fish to swim against the current. Any dead fish can simply go with the flow. People can learn a powerful lesson from those salmon!

     Paul also shared he was pressing “on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.” He knew that he was living life not for himself but for God. Living for something bigger than ourselves is a great motivator in our resolve to accomplish great things.

     Perhaps we need a restart in the new year. Resolve to learn from the words of the Apostle Paul and do the one thing that needs to be done to see your life transformed to impact the world around you.