Where to Start with the New Year

 WHERE DO MY PLANS START?

New year plan(s)

As I get older and significantly closer to the last toll gate in life’s travels, I think it’s important we put everything out on the table. I think we need to talk about that diet, painting the patio, maybe a new car/job/trip to Wisconsin.

This is the time of year gyms have sales on memberships. People are tired of looking like they should be in a Star Wars movie. They want that weight off, those lips injected, that hair colored some color that was never found here on planet Earth. All of this only to find us eleven months from now, dragging our ars’ around the mall again, looking for that bobble head thing our nephew wants for the 2022 Christmas gift exchange. While we do that, we see some sweatpants we think we can fit in to. Not the sweatpants we use for work from our home office we’ve had on since Covid hit, but some new ones for the New Year!  Again, making that promise for that new year to do it really right this time.

And so it goes.

Look, the reality is, you’ and me are fine. God sees us as perfect, white as snow. We’ve been bought by his son so what is not perfect about that outcome? Nothing that you need to do, you need to do like you’re on fire. Today, start with a walk. I have two dogs, two large dogs. They take me for a walk. Only God can help me when they get on a scent of something. I’m towed like a truck.  Put on some headphones and go for a walk. Have that deep conversation with yourself as if you were sitting at a bar—with yourself. Discuss your ideas—with yourself. Let yourself off the hook and simply realize you are not eighteen anymore, unless you’re reading this and you really are eighteen then I would say get your running shoes on and pick up the pace.

Make a ‘plan’ and then prepare for it to NOT happen. At least not the way YOU want it to happen. I’m not going to tell you about God and that there is a plan and it’s perfect and it has everything to do with you. That conversation you had with ‘yourself’-He was there. You don’t want to hear that. You just want to know how your new kale salad with warm lemon water will cleanse your liver and drop that luggage carrier around your waist. By the end of January, you will start to miss the extra day at the gym, the kale has gone limp in your fridge and your boss is still the focus of your prayer that he/she receive a raging bowel issue.

So, back to that walk. Go. Take a walk–alone. You’re really not alone, but you might be more inclined if you thought you were. If your married or partnered up, it’s okay if you tell the other ‘hey, Mark said I should go for a walk, you have to stay here. I love you, (I think I still do) but I just want to go walk and think. He said it’s okay if I do. Yes, I will be back, in a bit, I dunno.’

About ten minutes in, you will hear it. You can turn the music down, not off, you don’t need to lose Enya completely. But you will hear it. It will be like a whisper. ‘Walking with you makes me happy,’ you think the words say.

Then, there will be quiet.

You may walk the whole time and only hear that in your mind. By the time you get back, you may not have found any great resolution–except one.

You have come to realize–you’re not alone. You never were. The simple whisper made you realize all of it, every single part of your life is figured out. The one in charge of it, really does have a plan for the job, the luggage, the liver-life.

But first, He just wants to walk with you and show you the sunrise He made.

Enjoy the day.