Resolutions Just Don't Work For Me!

"Good habits are not made on birthdays, nor Christian character at the New Year. The workshop of character is everyday life. The uneventful and commonplace hour is where the battle is lost or won." --Maltbie Babcock

New Years resolutions are on everyone's mind. I wish mine from the past had magically changed me--and I could say that I had completed all of them successfully. Eat way more vegetables--CHECK. Read my Bible more than I watch TV--CHECK. Less Computer time--CHECK. Organize my meals each week--CHECK.

Nope--can't really say CHECK on any of the above. I just don't think I operate very well using the resolution technique to change my life.

The problem for me is that it is so all or nothing. If I mess up--just one day out of the year--I feel as if I have failed. And if I have failed, I feel like giving it all up.

A better way for me is to look at my life through God's eyes--rather than through the grid of the "all-or-nothing" grid of the resolution. God looks for progress, never expecting perfection, but success comes in progression.

I guess that is why I like the quote that I copied and pasted above. Someday, my character will not be based on the resolutions that I made and later failed. Rather than making rules for myself that I can never keep, I hope to walk more with God--each second of the day, so that I can show grace to those He puts in my path, extend forgiveness when it seems humanly impossible, take care of my body each moment when I know I shouldn't be eating through my anxieties and stresses, and spend time with the Lord--not because I have made a rule at the beginning of the year, but for the sole reason that I just want to spend time with my Father who loves me.

My New Year's Resolution? Walk with God each moment of this year, 2010, and when I don't, and I mess up?--yes, this will happen umpteen times--look to God, ask for His forgiveness, and continue forward.