My annual New Years resolution performance review
Today, Kel and I were taking an afternoon walk up Locust Creek, usually a 30-ish minute up-and-back where we turn around at the meadow about three quarters of a mile past our house. We did the same thing last New Year’s Eve, and while I don’t remember everything we talked about, I know that I love these walks with my wife. It’s some of the best time we can spend together as a couple–enough time for a good conversation and always free of the (kid) distractions that (kids) often pop up.
This was a pretty good year, we decided. Really good.
There have certainly been harder years, both collectively for us and the world. And that’s not to say this year was easy by any stretch–there were times of loss, times of sickness, times of difficulty. It’s hard to look back at the entire year, though, and not feel like it was incredible. The kind where I can only think to shake my head and pray for counsel on what to do with it all.
This past January I set out my annual list of New Years resolutions, and keeping with tradition, I’m offering an honest assessment of how it’s gone.
God is not Time and Temperature
Episcopalians who are familiar with the Morning Prayer liturgy may remember in its Rite II form a canticle that comes from the second of Isaiah’s four servant songs.
Seek the Lord while he may be found;
ISaiah 55:6-7
call on him while he is near.
Let the wicked forsake their ways
and the unrighteous their thoughts.
Let them turn to the Lord, and he will have mercy on them,
and to our God, for he will freely pardon.
Isaiah is a regular stop on the Advent cycle. During this season, in fact, the Morning Prayer liturgy opens with two different pieces of scripture from this book. They offer two ideas: that we are in the wilderness, and that God will soon reveal himself to us.
You might remember the prophet Isaiah from the token verse of his calling. God asked who he should send, and Isaiah answered, “Here am I! Send me!” I admit that as a child, whatever I assigned to Isaiah in my brain was dramatically reduced to lines like that–but it’s worth remembering that this prophet lived and wrote some 800 years before the birth of Christ. The book’s narrative essence follows a time of captivity, a time of punishing Babylonian captivity and exile, and afterward, a time of restoration.
I receive a daily Advent meditation by email, and this morning’s scripture was Isaiah 55:6-13, which begins with the passage quoted above. For some reason, the first sentence landed differently: Seek the Lord while he may be found.