New Year's Resolutions

As the family is packing up decorations from our month of celebrations, and the kids are upstairs playing in the play room, I am reminded how very blessed I am to be surrounded--literally surrounded on all sides--by such love and happiness.  In this time of peace and thanksgiving, it is good to ponder on what things I should focus in the coming year.  I have chosen three:

 

To be generous and kind

I am normally able to be generous with things.  Mandi and I welcome others into our house frequently and we share what we have.  I tend to do this on my own terms, though, and so I will look for the opportunities God may put in front of me to challenge the boundaries of our generosity.

One area where I can be quite stingy is with my time.  While sometimes I give freely, it is often for my own purposes and I will also squander it purposelessly.  Here I will focus on giving this precious gift from God freely to others wherever I am able to help.

Kindness is another story, and applies to me only sporadically.  I admit I can be quite hard, and this is not what we are called to be.  This doesn't necessarily mean I need to change the purpose of my actions--children still need to be punished, directions need to be given, negotiations finalized.  Rather I should learn to do things in a kinder, more gentle way, giving my children and others who look to me an example worth following.  I do not fully grasp the effect I have when I am too stern, and so this is a real opportunity to make changes that will have a lasting effect on the people I interact with, be they family, friends or business.

To do everything I can to put my family and the company I serve on firm financial footing.

God has been extraordinarily generous to me, taking care of me and my family through the downturn and through a change in employment that, because of it's timing, could have been quite tumultuous.  He calls us to be responsible stewards of what we have been given, and I have stewardship responsibilities in both my family and business.

There is no disguising that this will require hard work and sacrifice, but if I do things right and follow the path that God teaches, it again is an opportunity to make changes and put structures in place that will have a lasting effect on my family, the company I serve and the people associated with it, be they employees, partners, investors, customers or suppliers.  It is a time to de-risk both my family and the company.

To understand how agnostics and the early Christians came to their beliefs



I read the Bible nearly every day, I teach my family, I go to church, I pray frequently...and yet there is in me a deep-seated independence that defies all efforts to harness it.  I don't disbelieve God or anything He says--He has been too persistent in his love and tender care for me--but there is a rebellious nature in me that makes me occasionally throw down the shackles and run away, even if for just a little while.  Sometimes I even get jealous of Him, and talk to and treat Him as an equal.  This isn't right.

An equally strong and persistent urge has been a life-long search for the truth.  It is what led me to God--He is "the Truth."   I plan to make a study of how the early Christians came to their understanding of God, from first principles and early documents.

On the other side, the Bible clearly says that we cannot know God through human wisdom (1 Corinthians 1:20-23).  There are some very smart people who seriously address the question of God and get stuck at exactly this point: they acknowledge His existence, but do not come to know Him.  Are they turned off by the church and organized religion and so reject it in favor of a home-grown version?  Can they not make a decision between the different religions?  Is it just laziness?  Fear that they might lose their self-primacy?  Is it an absence of the Holy Spirit in their lives--were they not selected (Romans 9:24)?   Other than the absence of the Holy Spirit, I have been in all of these places--perhaps agnosticism is simply the batter's box for Christianity?  In any case, this is a question I intend to ponder this year.

I don't know if either of these will help tame the tiger within me, but I do believe some good will come of it.