It’s A New Beginning

As I have been planning my new year, I just want to take this opportunity to tell you how much I appreciate your faithfulness in being a part of this community!  Sometimes, I’m not sure if it helps or encourages anyone, but then I will get a message from one of you and it is thanking me for post.  So, as a part of my new year, I will continue to share my thoughts and life with you in hopes that it will bring hope and encouragement to you just when you need it.

It has been an interesting start to my new year  I have been sick since shortly after the New Year.  I spent a week and a half just laying in bed, for the most part.  I tried everything imaginable to help myself get over it rather than getting a doctor appointment, spending the money on a co-pay, and have them tell me, “Just drinking lots of fluids and (take some over the counter thing) get lots of rest.”  So I doctored myself.  Did ok, but my tummy is seriously a mess from whatever it was I had.  The upside?  I can’t eat very much because of the tummy issues, and so I think I am losing some weight!  There IS a silver lining, right?  🙂

But I am excited about 2016 and have a few questions for you:

• So what does your life look like as you start the year?
• Are you happy to start something new?
• Do you feel any anticipation about this year?
• Do you breathe a sigh of relief that last year is finally over?

Go get your coffee, tea, hot chocolate, put your feet up for a few minutes and let’s chat about this.

What are you thinking as you live out the daily life of 2016?  It’s not about a list of dos and don’ts.  It’s about positive changes.  For me, I remember God’s faithfulness to me last year and all that He did, and I look with anticipation for all He will do this year.  But there is something about thinking of a new year that pushes us to believe that it is going to better than last year.  Really?  So… does that mean you are going to do something different this year in the way you live, the way you think, how you look at your life and circumstances, or trust God MORE than you trusted Him last year?  Because if we don’t change “us” then we don’t change this year either.  We will continue to have the same patterns.  There may be things that iron themselves out, but over all, we are the ones that change how things go for us because we change how we do our life.  We are the ones that choose how we look at things that happen around us.  Not everything happens to us, but it can feel like that sometimes.  I am thankful that I have a new year to change how I look at those times.

Here is what is different for me:

• Go to God first!  Sometimes in the midst of emotions, we forget.  Prayer is the key even more than last year for me.
• I have learned that making my life less busy helps me to concentrate more on the areas that I want to improve.
• It is about looking at what is right, instead of all that is wrong.  I know for myself, I can get into what is wrong and right a book about it.  I don’t want to be an author of that kind of book of life.
• I will look at what is right and build on it.
• If I have a hard day, or even a few hard days, it doesn’t mean I have a hard life.
• Just because things don’t go the way I would like them to go doesn’t mean that it’s going the wrong way.
• Be IN God’s Word.  Get it down deep in my heart, not just in my head.

Take the walls down.  Lean on people God has placed around you.  Be a part of a community of people who you can go to and feel good about asking for help.  Learn to lean.  It’s ok to call someone and say, “I’m having a hard day and feel like I can’t keep going.  Could you pray for me?”

I have had some hard decisions that have had to be made just in the last couple of weeks.  It has been hard not to be disappointed, or get angry over the circumstances, or feel like I have always had to do things this way.   It would be nice for just once, to have it be different, where what is a problem is never an issue for me anymore.  Been there?  But when I start looking at through the lens of gratitude, things shift and God changes my heart.  I get back up, dust myself off, and say, “Ok Lord.  I don’t know the why, but I know YOU, and you do.  Now, help me, by the work of the Holy Spirit, to remember that the next time I’m a stinker about it.”  It’s like playing a detective about ourselves and asking ourselves the hard questions, but then walking it out when the answer comes.

I am seeking to live well.  I desire:

• Having good health
• Enjoying more quiet and reflective time
• I desire to walk deeper in God’s Word
• Spend designated time with my grandson
• Appreciate more and more the nature around me and with my camera to document God’s goodness
• More community with friends than last year
• Put more of the music back in my life
• Enjoy my heritage that God has given me
• Get a ukulele and learn to play it
• Live without regrets

I have a couple of pages in my little book so far of my goals for this year.  It’s fun to consider the journey God will take me on to enable me to fulfill desires I believe He has put on my heart.  I pray for each post that I write in hopes that it reaches hearts to encourage.  So my desire for you is that you are encouraged not to look at your life as something too busy to implement any changes, but as a new opportunity to live each day in the moment, and totally change your life from something you live each day to something that fulfills you each day!  God bless you to that end.

Walking the journey with you…