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How to have a truly happy new year.

For the first time in years, I don’t remember my New Year’s resolution from January. Usually, I write it down in my journal or on a note I stick to my mirror. There’s been many of those dog-eared sticky notes from years past. The year of contentment. Speaking life. We passed pancakes across the breakfast table on January 1st this year. “What do you want from 2018?” I can’t remember my answer. I know what I didn’t want though. I didn’t want to walk into her office and share the parts of my life I’m inclined to hide. I didn’t want to Facetime her the day after she delivered her baby that never breathed. I didn’t want to spend four months wondering how I’d walk into her house on Christmas day and see her empty chair. I didn’t want to go on another first date that led nowhere. We sit across from each other in a little coffee shop in Colorado, picking at a charcuterie board. “When I think about all of the things I have left to go through,” her voice cracks....
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Why It's Okay When Nothing Goes As Planned

There. On the second floor of the University Community Centre, I told her how I envisioned my life. Like a straight line--like the smooth edge of the horizon against the calm of a Great Lake.

That was four years ago.

Now, I sit on the couch in a house that looks like all the houses beside it. Just off the busiest highway in North America.

Nothing has gone as planned.

A child’s ideal. An adult’s reality. Two incompatibilities.

What did David understand as he cared for his father’s flocks? As a boy, did he dream of a simple life? As a man and a king, did he view his past with amazement?  

Or Jonah. Did he plan to be swallowed by a fish and spit out again?

And was it what Paul expected when he was chained to prison walls, confined to house arrest?

It’s a comfort as the fog rolls in on a Saturday and I can barely see the house next to me. It’s a comfort that life is not like the horizon on a clear day. That nothing went as I planned.

Because my plans are like me--flawed, imperfect.

My plans are small. And I cannot think high enough thoughts. I cannot plan big enough plans.

But I know Someone who does.

Who is.

And she asks me what God has been doing in my life. And I stumble to answer.

I don’t know, but I know He’s doing something good.

“For it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure.” Philippians 2:13


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