New Year's Resolutions

This post was written for a contest to be a guest blogger at www.beekman1802.com and much to my surprise, it was one of the blog entries selected. In all honesty, I think they selected all that were submitted, so I won for the effort, but it is still great to be able to support these guys and be supported by them! You can find my guest blogging entry here. Thanks to Josh and Brent for selecting this entry.

New Year’s resolutions on January 1 haven’t formally been a tradition in our house for several years. However, as we walk by one another throughout the house, you may hear one of us say, “That should be one of my New Year’s resolutions.” Then we laugh, knowing that we are not likely to actually take on this “resolution”...at all. Usually, these are moments of self realization where one of us is in need of a change!

As I read the Huffington Posts’ “New Year’s Resolutions for 2011” article today, there were even more self revelations taking place. I noticed that each of the 70 plus resolutions were concerned with personal care, personal interactions, or care for our environment. All moments where someone was in need of a change.

New Year’s resolutions are our attempts to respond to these moments of self revelation of something that needs to be changed or adapted in our life. If we have taken time to reflect on our lives and our relationships with one another, and if we take our resolutions seriously, then we may actually have a chance to keep these resolutions. For all our sakes, I hope we all can make these resolutions a way of life.

If we can make them a way of life, our planet will be a cleaner place, our relationships will be friendlier, we will be loving our neighbor as much, if not more than our self, and we all will be living a healthier lifestyle...for more than just a week or two.

What are your New Year’s resolutions? Are you going to improve your personal health, the health of your relationships, or try to preserve this Island Home that we all share? For me, it is about the relationships: relationships with our God, relationships with our family, relationships with our neighbor and relationships with our selves whether they are made on January 1 or July 31.

Happy New Year and may your resolutions survive the next couple of weeks and for all of our sakes, become your new way of life!