a year in review, issue #1

One of my favorite things about life is definitely that things never go as you plan. 

This year was the year I think, if I'm honest, I planned to save the world. 

I started the year heading to New Beginnings - with grand plans to help girls who had gone astray and help my husband get through the year so he could bust out some major seminary action and learn from some of the best at our church, and help my kids become theology-speaking toddlers who could do cartwheels & their own laundry. 

Of course, that was not the theme of the year. I realized shortly that living in community was like my cryptonite and actually brought out the worst in me. My daughter was born and really did not like being alive for the first few months of her life, this and homesickness & sin led me to a really nasty period of something that looked a lot like postpartum-depression. All of this led me to fear being away from my husband for more than five minutes and really have a strong need to look at my issues of contentedness with the lifestyle we've chosen. I remember hitting August and repeatedly promising friends - "soon, it won't be all about me anymore... you won't have to keep hearing about my issues soon!" I also repeatedly was shocked at my unwillingness to let people around me be sinful, to let them be themselves while becoming extremely irate if they had anything but passive grace for me. 

But the more I stuck my fingers in my ears and looked at my environment as my problem to overcome, I missed the fact that the real problem of everything was my own sin. Pride, judgement, impatience, blame, laziness, doubt, and a long list of others were all that stared back at me in the mirror when I looked for the culprit of my hurt. Unfortunately, I was the one committing all the offenses. So sometime around September, I started surveying the damage. I knew I couldn't fix it until I took stock of it and while I wanted that to be a weekend-long inventory, it's still going strong. So 2009 is all about that, with a twist.

2009 is going to be all about taking it all in - my humanness, my need for Jesus, my utter lack of capability without him WHILE holding my hands open to let Him pull me up and fix it. It's not about fixing anyone else, saving anyone else, or changing anyone else's lives - it's all about taking responsibility for my sanctification & praying that being really honest about that within my context will be encouraging for someone else and will point them to Christ in the same way. I think that is why I love being a daughter of Christ so much - when we finally step up and take responsibility, we do it by giving someone else full control. Amen. 

Don't get me wrong, I think there is much work to be done through me & the hubs this year - for goodness sakes, we have kids that need correction & teaching & raising and a world that has to hear the gospel. It will just be very sweet for me to speak all those words with the full knowledge that I need that gospel more than anyone else who lives. I need the discipline and the patience more than my little kiddos do, and The Word is like a lifeline that I'm holding onto with all my might. 

So - I've never picked a passage or verse for an entire year to meditate on and who knows, it may change with the next month... but Psalm 145 is my heart's cry for now. Tonight I was walking and listening to Shane & Shane's version of this song and I was just on the verge of literally freaking out. I wanted to stomp-dance on the pavement and scream the beautiful words at the cars that passed me by. If ever there was an anthem that would have me with scabs on my knees from kneeling and sore arms from raising - it would be this part. 

More of the year in review to come. 

But I'm oh-so-excited for 2009.