Two Steps Back to Make One Step Forward

The New Year is traditionally a time for resolutions, for a new, focused plan for personal betterment. I have no new no plan. I have no new focus.

This does not mean I’m not motivated to change.

If you read the Old Testament, the Israelites are a frustrating group of people. They are chosen by God and are explicitly told of all the benefits this includes. Then they screw up. They suffer. God fixes everything. They are happy. They screw up. They suffer. God fixes everything. . . You get the idea. They make the same mistakes over and over, and they look stupid. And they look familiar.

If you’re a follower of this blog, you know that I will at times use this as a forum for self-reflection and for points of focus for personal betterment. It’s easy to type about a plan or an idea; it’s difficult to live out that plan for a period longer than a week.

This new year, I look backward with the goal of moving forward. I’ve gone back through my 2010 blog posts, and I’ve found that I wrote about getting better at the following goals:

• Avoid an average life: be God-centered (especially in my coaching)
• Haste to bring him laud
• Have the peace that passeth understanding
• Pray big
• Have child-like faith: be curious and passionate and joyful
• Don’t fight alone, fight with God
• Be exceptional in the ordinary things
• Exhibit great joy and faith and self-control in times of adversity
• Fear the loss of God, not the loss of comfort
• Recognizing that I’m a tree in a story about a forest: I must care about the outcomes of others’ lives.

One mantra I repeat to my players is to not make the same mistake twice. The above list addresses problems I’ve made on an almost daily basis. To begin the New Year, I look to this list to guide my mental energies, my personal reform.

I can’t go after all of them at once. Being mediocre at many things is no good. I plan to focus on a new one each month. I start at the top. The next 8 weeks will be a whirlwind: I will seek to be God-centered in all that I do.

Happy New Year.