We’re big new year’s resolution people over here. Each year I look forward to setting goals in a variety of areas. Last year I watched my husband carefully plan out his goals. He posted them prominently in our room. They were ambitious. They were varied. They were measurable. They were everything that good goals should be. And he was good about keeping track of his progress. But then life hit. HARD. Like a train wreck. And because his attention was demanded elsewhere, the goal chart started to look more empty. Gradually that chart seemed to be a record of all he wasn’t accomplishing instead of what he was. Eventually, maybe in the summer sometime, he took it down. I have thought about that off and on during this year of hard things. I have thought about his missed goals and how lousy looking at that chart could have made him feel. I wish he could see MY chart for his accomplishments—or better still, God’s. The one that marked every sacrifice, every kind deed. Every smile through tears, every moment of picking himself (and more often me) back up and trying again. Every important, unmapped detour taken out of love. Every way we grew in ways we never even considered. There were some big check boxes in our year that did get marked, and some that didn’t. But what stands out to me more are the little, truly character-defining moments. The things that no chart can ever display. The important things buried in everyday life that make us who we really are. Are we setting goals for the new year? Yes, because that’s a good thing to do. But I am also grateful for a year of “missed” things that allowed us all, quite unexpectedly, to grow a little more into who God wants us to be. And I am also grateful for the little, the normal, the status quo, the now, that I don’t think I will ever take for granted, again.
