New Year's Evaluation
“If you could kick the person in the pants responsible for most of your trouble, you wouldn't sit for a month.” — Theodore Roosevelt
It's that time of year again—the time when we make New Year's resolutions that we probably won't keep three weeks into the year. Perhaps by the time you read this, you will already have "failed" at your goal.
Here's an idea: instead of a New Year's resolution, how about a New Year's evaluation? Before we can make real change in our lives, we need to evaluate ourselves to gain insight into who we are and the kind of change we need. Toward that end, take one week and evaluate everything you do and ask yourself one question about each of your activities: does what I'm doing right now make me feel alive or dead inside?
In the movie Chariots of Fire, Eric Liddell is training for the Olympics rather than immediately returning to his mission in China. He explains his rationale to his sister, saying, “I believe God made me for China, but He also made me fast, and, when I run, I feel his pleasure.”
We all spend some time each day and each week doing things that make us feel dead inside (paying bills, doing taxes, taking out the trash, etc.). However, there ought to be many things that we do that make us feel alive. I believe that the joy we feel, like Eric Liddell’s, is often the joy of the Holy Spirit.
For example, perhaps your struggle is not that you need to get more financially healthy so you will be more joyful—maybe your finances are in trouble because you're not joyful. Over the years, you may have removed things from your life that gave you pleasure. Now, you've been left with the temporary pleasure that buying things provides, but your life is devoid of pleasure in other areas. If that's the case, changing how you spend your money without understanding the place of money in your life may leave you less joyful, which will likely result in you sabotaging your goal and feeling like a failure.
It is this kind of evaluation of ourselves that leads to life transformation. Take the first step of evaluating and gaining greater insight. After you're done, sit down with a friend, your pastor, or a counselor to move from insight to action in your life. You may find that you will end up focusing on other areas of life than you originally intended.
