..and no, it’s probably not because you’re not trying hard enough.
No shade, but I don’t buy into the new year/ new you nonsense. And that is not because I don’t like resolutions, in fact, I am a huge fan. I have a whole bookshelf full of journals and a stationary bill to prove that a new year does not, in fact, equal a new you. Resolutions contain the matter of our values and aims, and without something to aim for, well, you are just like a guy playing darts with a blindfold on. That’s true.
But, and this is a big but, resolutions in themselves hold no transformative power. The things that kept you from pursuing Christ in His word, putting Jesus first, making time to read or disciple your kids, saying no to that second piece of cheesecake or third glass of wine and yes to a jog around the block are still there. They do not magically disappear because the date changed and you wrote some stuff down.
Our resolutions often peter out by February like a 40-something woman by 9PM. And that is why, so often, we turn back to that neatly written list halfway through a year only to realise: This was just a prop to prop up my fears at the start of a new year. It was all for show. Like a politician’s Bible.
Here’s why I believe our resolutions don’t work:
They address behaviours and not beliefs. We seldom do the deep introspection of asking ourselves why we have allowed our health to diminish and our weight to increase, and what it is behind those 4 pm cravings and the long work day with no time for exercise at the end of which we inevitably drown ourselves in Netflix. Instead, we put “exercise more” and “eat less” on our resolutions for the year. Look at your resolutions today and ask yourself, what kept me from doing these things last year? What is the belief/ lie/ conviction/ attitude I am holding to that is keeping me from progressing? This is something I speak about a lot in the Mommy Diaries because we do this with our kids too. We address the behaviour without addressing the cause of the behaviour and so we don’t give our kids (or ourselves, as the case may be) the tools to actually change.
They can seem very pass-fail. Let’s say we set a goal to have a daily time of devotion. Often the result is that we believe we have only succeeded if we had time in God’s word at 5 AM for 30 days straight. See? Pass/ fail. Which kinda makes you wanna give up, right? Here’s something I think is better. What if instead we gently corrected our priorities (and diaries) so as to gently direct our time and therefore our effort towards putting God first more regularly instead of less regularly? What if instead of setting a finite goal we identified an area where we know we need to do some intentional work and aimed for progress in that area? Then, if you managed 3 quiet times this week and 4 next week, that is a pass, not a fail, if your goal was “Spend more time in God’s word” and not “Have quiet time every day”. Ya feel me?
We try to go it alone. Most often with our white-knuckle-willpower and the latest self-help book under one arm. But life change comes from heart change and heart change comes from God. Your growth in discipline, maturity and character is not a DIY Project. The transformation we seek is valid, but the means by which we seek it are often insufficient. We need Jesus to transform us into His likeness, and resolve alone isn’t enough. The Bible tells us to “commit our plans to the Lord” (Prov 16 v 3), and it’s a verse we love quoting at this time of the year! But here’s where we go wrong: to “commit our plans” does not mean to make our plans, piously pray about them and then go on our way. That word “commit” is the Hebrew word “galal”, which means to roll away or roll down a burden, the way a camel, in order to lay down a heavy load, must kneel down and tilt over so as to roll its heavy load onto the ground. So to commit our plans to the Lord means surrendering them to Him in recognition of our need of Him in every area. How would you approach your goals differently if you had a greater sense of your dependence on Christ?
Our new year’s resolutions most often reflect our discontent. I am not saying there is anything wrong with desiring change but 1) often the change we desire is circumstantial or external and 2) the real power for change actually lies in contentment. Not discontentment. So we enthusiastically (even spiritually) set those – often external, often circumstantial – goals and then say “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me” (Phil 4 v 14). But if we ever read this often misquoted verse in context this is what we would see: The thing Paul was able to do through the strength Christ gave him was to be content in all circumstances, with a little, with a lot, with abundance or with need. Because THAT is what the strength of Christ is for. The strength of Chris is to power our contentment. Not our discontentment. But, if we read v 11 – 13 we would also see that Paul said he “learned” to be content. Learning implies a process. What would change about your new year’s resolutions if learning to be content was the driver and not your perpetual discontent?
Whether resolutions are your vibe or not, don’t place your hope in your ability to change yourself. Because if that was actually possible, Christ died for nought. If you believe what the gospel tells us about Him and about ourselves, that true transformation is only found in Him, what would you resolve to do this year? How would that truth change the focus of your resolutions from outward to inward?
Need inspiration? I once came up with a list of “what not to do” as my new year’s resolutions: read it here.
Now let me just confess this upfront. I’m a list maker by nature. I love the idea of ordering my thoughts and hopes and dreams into the most beautiful outline, most creative presentation, as though simply the act of putting pen to paper and making it look instapretty can provide the impetus required to push through on every lofty ideal for the new year. And when the 31st of December rolls around I am just about giddy with the”blank page, second chance, do-over” 1 January presents. But here is the problem with New Years Resolutions:
The truth is that we are all actually plagued by this one question: “How best should I live my life?” In recent years this has changed to “How do I live my best life?”… like it’s some kind of external construction that a vision board and a protein shake with kale will bring us. But deep down we know, our life flows from the inside out (Luke 6 v 45), not the other way around. Whatever we might want to change on the outside (exercise more/ spend less/ eat healthier/ be more patient) must first change on the inside (understand why I don’t exercise/ understand why I overspend/ understand why I comfort eat/ understand why I yell in the traffic), and there is only one way to change on the inside. Transformation doesn’t happen with goals or lists or plans. New Years Resolutions bring with them the allure of “This year I will “do” differently, when what we all really need is to “be” different before we can “do” differently. What we really need is an inner work. And so I have struggled and written many times about how best to approach a new year that doesn’t call us to fall into a more/more/more or a do/do/do trap that has no lasting impact.
The only thing I’ve ever seen cause true change in people’s lives is a deep and overwhelming understanding of the Gospel. And the only thing I have seen cause that change to be lasting and enduring is the work of the Holy Spirit through God’s word in the life of a believer. God’s word is penetrating (Heb 4 v 12) and more effective (2 Tim 3 v 16 – 17) than any insta slogan or vision board or hustle culture book with a relatable catchy title on the front and a lot of self-help covered in Christian-ese sauce on the inside.
And so at the start of every year, I ask God to give me a word for the year. I pray for it, and it starts to take shape during my devotional time, as I read and meditate, where a theme or word just keeps popping up or just deeply resonates and drives me in my reading. This word then serves to inspire me to live a life of faith, serves as a daily reminder of His truth and can become a prophetic marker in making decisions and moving ahead.
As you read and pray over the next few days, here are some questions you can ask yourself to help you identify your word for 2021:
What area in your spiritual development has your conscience, the Holy Spirit been directing you to pay attention to?
What do you most need that only God can give that will help you take the next step in your calling?
What familiar themes are you noticing in your reading of God’s Word that seems to come up repeatedly? Remember His word is the first place He speaks. Whatever else we “hear” in the world must first line up with what we see in the Word.
If you could ask God to accomplish one thing in your heart this year, what would it be?
If you came to the end of 2021 and you looked back, what would you be praising God for accomplishing in you?
Hustle culture and its proponents have, by and large, ignored the fact that the call on the life of a believer is primarily about 2 things: Others and God’s Kingdom. Not self. In fact, to follow in Jesus’s footsteps is not merely less of self but the death of self. Not our vision for our life but His. Not our benefit but the benefit of those around us and the advancement of His Kingdom. If we say we believe the Bible we cannot separate ourselves from these truths.
So, whether you choose a word of whether you are a new years resolution or goals type girl, the best way to stay aligned with God in the way we enter into a new season is to choose goals/ words/ verses or markers that will:
Glorify God and Grow us
Give God space to move and guide us
Grounds us in His love more and more so we can be truly, deeply, internally transformed more and more.
(or lost or frazzled or disorganized or distracted or overwhelmed..basically, if you’re a modern-day woman)
I get it!
I am fairly confident that if you are reading this, you have a strong cerebral conviction that you MUST pray. Prayer is good. But sometimes you find yourself in a season where your prayers are trite, one-way conversations that sound allot like shopping lists and allot the same and that happen in the car or in the few minutes before you go to sleep. Or you find yourself disillusioned by a season of pleading desperation that didn’t actually “work”, and didn’t make you feel any more connected to God. Can I get a witness? I know what it’s like to suffer from distraction, frustration, lack of urgency, discipline and motivation in my prayer life. I have had to claw my way back into better habits and rhythms only to fall back into losing prayer in the blur of countless stressful days strung together. So here are some tips, from one struggling, distracted woman to another:
Determine your why: We have a ping pong table at home. It’s become a great opportunity for quality time between my husband and our boys. But my husband, God bless him, once made the fatal error of offering one of our boys a reward if he beat his dad at a heated game of ping pong. This, sadly, set a precedent whereby our son would only play when there was going to be a reward at the end. What my good husband was after, was quality time with his son. What my son was after, was a reward. It came to a point when I had to ask him a tough question: “do you spend time with Dad because of who he is to you or because of what he can give to you?”
Sometimes this is what our relationship with God is like. And this can be most evident in our prayer life.
There is no point in my starting off by saying “You must pray” if you’ve lost your “reason why”. And if you have lost your reason why, ultimately all I can tell you, is that our prayer life (or lack thereof) will reflect what we truly believe about God (eish, I know, truth bomb right!), whether we seek Him out because we have realised that in Him we live and breathe and have our being (Acts 17 v 28). Or whether we only hang out with Him if we can get something/ need something out of it. So first start off not by asking yourself, why don’t I pray, but asking yourself, what do I believe about who God really is?
Direct your thoughts and words: I have confessed before that my brain is always going in a thousand directions at once. I am like a laptop with too many tabs open. That is why “getting in the zone” to pray is hard for me. I also sometimes battle with praising and even thanksgiving beyond the tired, thoughtless phrases that I’ve so overused, and I’ve battled to find the words to pray for the people I love in a more directed, focused way.
So I cheat. I’m not even joking! I use a cute notebook with dividers in it, for all the areas of my life and people that I pray about and for. In fact, my prayers for my kids come in a whole little notebook of its own. I use it during my quiet time (if you struggle in that area, here is my cheat sheet for that too).
In here I write down scriptures, promises to pray for them, affirmations and praises to help me fix my mind on God.
So go on honey, head out to Typo, I am giving you permission to indulge your stationery fetish. Call it an investment in your prayer life. Buy something that can lie open in your hand (that is why I use ring-bound notebooks), that you can easily and quickly add to. I have found that without a firm foundation in scripture, my prayers are just like shopping lists. On the other hand, God’s Word is like a prayer vocabulary and when we use it to shape our prayer language (so to speak), prayer becomes a deep, rich, two-way experience, instead of a one-way list of requests. And having something written down to pray through, for me, is a concrete move against my own internal noise which I battle to quiet down.
One of the purposes of prayer is that it aligns us with God’s thoughts and desires, and when we pray scripture we have the opportunity to internalize His very character and for our daily life to be framed by it.
Actually writing down your prayers is also a way of staying focused during your prayer times. Even if you just have 5 minutes, use them to journal your prayers, giving substance and depth to even the shortest bite of time you are spending with God and inviting Him into your world.
“Don’t just read the Bible. Start circling the promises. Don’t just make a wish. Write down a list of God-Glorifying life goals. Don’t just pray. Keep a prayer journal. Define your dream. Claim your promise. Spell your miracle.” Mark Batterson – The circle maker.
Dedicate time: I know that many of you are in a life stage where even a simple quiet time is a challenge, much less dedicated time to pray (are you a young mom? Check this out) I am not saying there is anything wrong with praying in the car, or praying when you make the beds – we are supposed to “pray without ceasing” (1 Thes 5 v 16)! But when I am talking to my husband while driving to an event we might be talking, but we are not necessarily connecting, right? It wouldn’t be considered “building intimacy”, right? To build connection you need to be fully present. To build intimacy you need to take time – ask any husband who has tried to rush it an failed! And so in my marriage, I may not be able to dedicate time and resources to a full-on date night, but we can sit down and have a cup of coffee, be present for and with one another and listen/ talk for as long as a cup of coffee takes. And if you are in a busy and distracting season and it’s all you have, believe me, that is all it takes: 15 minutes in which connection is rekindled, in which time is given to sharing and listening, and we find ourselves walking away anchored in, steadied, heard, connected. So set it out in your mind for your coffee break at work, or the quick lunch you grab before fetching the kids. Put your phone away as you sip that coffee, and instead of being filled with the highlight real of someone else’s fake life (yes, I know you’re are scrolling Facebook when you’re waiting for the kettle to boil!) , open up your prayer book or journal if you have one, and allow yourself a few moments to be present with God and to be filled with the real sustenance of the gift of rest.
Dump Perfect: in fact, apply this across the board to every area of your life! We often approach the disciplines of our spiritual life (devotions, prayer, fasting etc) the same way we approach diets, fatalistically. We go at full tilt, knuckling down for a time, until we fall off the wagon (thanks Cinnabon!) and then, instead of saying, “aww man, I shouldn’t have eaten that whole thing, but ok, I am picking up where I left off”, we say;”Aww man, this day (weekend/ week) is a write-off, I am giving in and I will start again on Monday!” In our spiritual life, we have this set idea that our interactions with God should look a certain way, take a certain shape and amount of time, make us feel x,y or z, and if we can’t have/ do that, we might as well not even attempt anything. And in that we lose our unction, we lose sight of the importance of the spiritual realm and its impact and then we wonder why we feel like our prayers hit the ceiling. I love the saying: “perfect is the enemy of done”. Because surely a simple, sincere prayer uttered in a moment of awe, understanding, desperation, is better than a perfectly crafted doxology left unspoken?
“If in prayer I come before a throne of grace, the faults of my prayer will be overlooked.” Charles Spurgeon
Dare to be honest: I hope you also have a group of friends in your life where you know you can be your authentic, uncensored self. Friends who love you in such a way that they don’t make you feel like your too much, or not enough, for whom you don’t need to dumb down or dress up any part of yourself in order to feel at home. I am blessed to have a few like that. And if I compare how I feel when I am around them with how I feel when I am around people in front of whom I can’t be myself, I know who I would rather hang out with, and I appreciate the authenticity of those relationships all the more. It’s no different with God. We are bound to seek Him out all the more if we experience the truth about His loving character and nature to us if we enter in with a conviction of His grace. We are bound to avoid Him if we have allowed the burden of sin and shame to pile up like dirty dishes in our soul, bound to skirt formally around Him if our picture of Him has become affected by half-truths and earthly wisdom and religiosity.
You have permission to be unhappy before God, desperate, ungrateful even, superficially joyful, just plain you.
Just take a stab at praying through the Psalms if you don’t believe me.
In Genesis Hagar refers to God as El Roi, as she experiences God as One who truly sees her in a world where she feels utterly unseen. You are seen darling, and loved, chosen, sought out not just despite of who you are, but because of it. That is the God we draw near to when we draw near in prayer.
Can I encourage you in whatever season you find yourself, to make small shifts in your schedule and perspective to have your daily life transformed by prayer?
“To pray is to change. All who have walked with God have viewed prayer as the main business of their lives. For those explorers in the frontiers of faith, prayer was no little habit tacked onto the periphery of their lives, it was their life. It was the most serious work of their most productive years. Nothing draws us closer to the heart of God. “ Richard Foster
Three times in the last 2 weeks. That’s how many times I was asked this question by moms of young children. That’s how I knew it was a thing. That’s also how I knew I must be old!
How do you keep growing with God when you are in the throws of the not-sleeping, always-feeding-burping-changing-or running-after, why-must-they-get-up-at-5AM-on-Saturdays madness of those early years with kids?
It’s not as complicated as you think:
Raise your expectations of God and lower your expectations of yourself!
Because what would your life, your walk with Jesus look like if you expected to see God every day all day any time of day, and you got rid of the expectations of what your walk with Him is supposed to look like (which very often mostly depends on things you do)? What if you placed all your expectations on the promise of His nearness in this season of your life, instead of placing it on your own ability to carve out 60 precious quiet, uninterrupted minutes. The dichotomy is that nothing will test the fiber of your faith like being a mom, and yet in that season you are relegated to noisy cry-rooms listening to half of a sermon and you can barely carve out time to wash your hair much less wash your spirit in a solid daily quiet time. You can barely go to the bathroom alone, much less have alone time with Jesus. And there you are in a season where you need Jesus more than ever!
The good news is that I have some points that may encourage you. In other good news, I will keep it short. For obvious reasons! There is a way that we can journey with God and grow in our faith in the challenging season of early parenthood if we can just let go of the idea of that we have in our head that it’s all supposed to look a certain way. So..
Let God do what God does: Too often in life, we have a very high expectation of ourselves and actually a very low expectation of God. You can hear it in the way we pray. The way we are always asking Him to help us do things and how seldom we just ask Him to do them. He is still on the throne, even if you feel you might have lost the plot.
Do your best but don’t trust your best. Instead see parenting for what it really is – the biggest trust exercise you will ever complete and your biggest ever leap of faith! Trust God.
Let the Word do what the Word does: It’s sharper than a two-edged sword (Heb 4 v 12) and it never returns void (Is 55 v 11). When your days are long and your attention span is short, take one verse, or maybe 2 (on the days that kid slept through the night). Write it on a cue card (I use these all the time) and give yourself time to memorize it. Read it in the morning when you wake up and just before you go to sleep, meditate on it as you make dinner, sink into it as you stand at the sink, keep a card in your car and next to the feeding chair or the changing station, pray it over yourself and over your kids. Let it do something in you, instead of you trying to do something with it! Oh and listen, I love me a good ‘ole girlfriend devotional any day of the week, and of course there is a season for that, but I really believe that in the long run 2nd hand conviction won’t carry us. Each of us is responsible to get into the Word for ourselves. And the year that you have that first or second or third baby is NOT the year that you also read through the bible. Just let that go ok! Take a bite-size, chew on it for a couple of days. See what happens.
Let worship do what worship does: Do you worship in your home, or do you leave that for Sundays? Worshipping God is a powerful thing. Whether you are blasting Hillsong at full force or simply out-loud-my-neighbors-think-I’m-crazy speaking gratitude and praise to God (ascribing to Him the Glory due to His name alla David style in Psalm 29v2) as you pack the lunchboxes; there is power and authority in the act. The act of worship draws our eyes upwards and our hearts closer to God as we see Him more clearly and ourselves more clearly. Be intentional about bringing worship into your home and creating a spiritual atmosphere that can influence your spirit and help you draw near to God when the slog of parenting leaves you parched for intimacy with Him. It will do you good. It will do your children good.
We end up walking around with this huge expectation that we as moms are somehow letting our faith “slip” and we really should just “try harder or get up earlier” with some pinterest perfect spirituality when in fact there is no better time than when you first become a mom for you to realise that
weak is the new strong and that the whole parenting deal doesn’t rise and fall on your ability to parent but on your ability to trust God MORE.
AW Tozer says that it is in the nature of God to speak, He is never silent, and the one who doesn’t expect to hear God speak will discount what He says. Soooooo, higher expectation of God, lower expectation of self. Do you know what you need for the chaos and the fears and the battles of parenting (no, of LIFE!)? You need songs and prayers! And the Bible is full of both! And all the sisters said: AMEN!
Jip, one month to go and then I would’ve gone 10 months without indulging my serious fashion fetish. I feel the way my wardrobe looks – worn out! Soulsearching and exerting extreme willpower will do that to a girl!
But ok, this is what I realised: Once your salvation is secure, the best Satan can do is distract you, preoccupy you and keep you from maturing. The biggest battles in our lives, our biggest challenges and the things that place us on the precipice of progress or defeat in the faith is not the things we see, it is the things in the unseen.
If Satan can keep us from noticing what is happening in our hearts, his belt is notched with our inneffective insignificance.
The unexamined life is a tragedy, we all know this. Examining our lives is essential if we want to grow and progress, especially in the faith. But very often these ideals are just that – ideals, things we say as believers like we know them but we’ve never done them, certainly not at any deep level. That was me! I was poorer for it…
“Now therefore, thus says the LORD of hosts, “Consider your ways! “You have sown much, but harvest little; you eat, but there is not enough to be satisfied; you drink, but there is not enough to become drunk; you put on clothing, but no one is warm enough; and he who earns, earns wages to put into a purse with holes.” Thus says the LORD of hosts, “Consider your ways!” Haggai 1 v 5-7
In “considering my ways” in the last 10 months I have been so convicted about the fact that God’s heart towards me is undivided, but that my heart towards Him is fragmented into a million different pieces. I am an expert rationaliser, always quick to say this interest or that passion or this hobby or preoccupation or choice or this way of doing or thinking doesn’t take away from how I journey with God. I discovered otherwise. CS Lewis said that every time we make a choice, we are turning the central part of ourselves into something a little different than what it was before, and so in our life as a whole, through our innumerable choices, we are moving towards harmony with God or the opposite. When I took the time to “consider” it certainly shone a light on places in my life where I am not in step with Him.
So can I encourage you today?
To get uncomfortable: Listen Lovely, this is a corner piece of the puzzle right here. Because your comfort is the single biggest thing opposing your spiritual progress. Because it’s only in a state of discomfort that we can grow. So, launch yourself hard out of your comfort zone, challenge yourself hard on the areas in your life you thought had nothing to do with God… believe me, revelations await as your reward and progress as your prize.
To hear His voice louder: Sometimes we care more about what they say or the scale says than what He says. When was the last time you spent time anchoring yourself in His opinion of you? Digging for that gold in His word is a reset button for the mind and the heart, making us more able to set our hearts on the things above. You know, as opposed to setting it on what Olivia Pope is wearing in The Fixer or how many (or few?) likes that post got?
To think about That Day more than this day: So that today’s pursuits and passions and even pleasures will always have the end in sight. Because when I get to heaven I am pretty certain I am not going to say: ” I wish I had bought more clothes!” or “I wish I was more on trend!” or “I wish my cupboard looked like Khloe Kardashian’s!”
To ask the difficult question: Which in this case for me was “What is God’s greatest competition in my life?” Honey, I promise you answering this question is a worthwhile quest. What competes for your time, your money, your headspace, your attention. Is it your comfort? Is it your kids? Is it what other people think? Is it the Instagram body or the Pinterest life?
So hey, why not start your own movement, and move yourself forward in the faith! Because that is what happens when you let God into an area of your life that you thought had nothing to do with Him.
Part of maturing is letting God have Lordship over every area of our lives, even areas we thought was “separate” from Him. So whether it be #wearwhatsthere or #lovewhatsthere or #livewhatsthere or #overcomewhatsthere or #dowhatsthere…Why not do something that will take you to that place?
“Take away the dross from the silver and there comes out the pure metal for a vessel for the silversmith to shape” Prov 25 v4
