Goals for 2015

Every year for the past six years I have made it my annual tradition to prepare a list of goals and principles to live by in the upcoming year. It’s a little more thoughtful and deliberate than a new year’s resolution (or at least I like to think so.) It started innocently enough, one year in which I was feeling particularly ambitious. My goals run the gamut in terms of scope. One year my goals might be to finish a novel or run a half-marathon and another year they might be to buy a new pair of glasses. As I said, pretty wide spectrum. Every December (or January if I procrastinate) I set aside time to think through what I want to accomplish in the upcoming year. If I’m completely honest I’m not much of a long-term planner. I often have a hard time seeing the “big picture”. I’m also decidedly risk-averse (read: cowardly).

I had already given some thought and jotted down a few notes on what I want 2015’s goals to be when I went for a run a week ago. [Sidenote: running is one of the “principles” that I have been able maintain consistently. Yay me!] I was trying to find a way to articulate why I do this exercise year after year if I were asked. I circled around the answer: it is a way to get me closer toward where I want to be. But then I began to ask myself: where do I want to be? What is my life aiming for? I mean its one thing to say that I want to write 500 a day on the way to finishing a novel, but is that what I really want? It is indeed a very noble goal but is that truly where I really want to be going?

I pondered and pondered and pondered some more and this is what I rested upon:

In 2015 I want to respond immediately when the Lord calls. At the end of the day; at the end of my life, that is what I want to identify me: did I respond to Jesus.

I don’t know about anyone else, but I am very good at dismissing the Lord’s calling. I will be leaving church and feel that I should pray for someone, but I get into my truck and drive home. At work, I will know that I should ask a deeper, probing question, but I shrug it off. It’s not that I don’t know what the Lord is asking me to do, it is rather that I have become adept at ignoring it or rationalizing it away. For instance, the other day I was going to see a movie with my parents (The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies if you must know) and as we drove though my parent’s neighborhood, I saw a woman sitting on her porch sobbing. Immediately I felt the desire to pull over and ask if she was okay. But… we were already cutting it close on the movie start time AND we were almost to my parent’s house already AND I wasn’t the one driving. So we drove on.

Who knows what the outcome would have been. She probably would have thought me crazy and shooed me off her property, but that wasn’t the point. The point wasn’t the validity or rationality or probability of the request, it was the one asking, namely the Lord. Will I respond when He asks me to?

I don’t know where you want to go in life. I don’t know what kind of person you want to be. I don’t know what goals you hope to accomplish in 2015, but I encourage you to thoughtfully articulate them. Give them attention. Think about the man or woman you want to be and set yourself down that path. The only way you can control who you’ll be in 10, 15, or 20 years is to become that person today, this day, this moment.

As for me, my aim is to 1) actively listen and 2) respond immediately when the Lord calls.