Here We Go Again!

By Captain Terry Camsey – 

Can it really be 1998? It seems less than a year since we faced the annual tradition of setting in place resolutions for 1997, doesn’t it. How did you do?

Of course, there are resolutions and resolutions…

Some are not really resolutions at all. They are “wish” lists. Things we would like to see happen without any conscious effort on our part. Then there are those which are more like “to do” lists. Lengthy plans of action which are so daunting that, unable to keep up, we capitulate and dispense with them early in the year.

I was thinking about the various kinds of resolutions people make…

Some make New Year’s restolutions. These are the lists of good intentions that just lie there and do nothing. (Rather like the guy who bought a new time management organizer and complained to a friend that it had been lying on his desk for a whole month and hadn’t done a thing. “Must have gotten a dud one,” his friend commented!)

Then there are some who make New Year’s wrestleutions. They’re the ones that we fight to accomplish but, since they are too optimistic, we never seem to overcome the challenge of keeping them.

Some repeat the same resolutions year after year, living in hope that–one year–they will be accomplished. Resolutions, we might call those.

Maybe you are one of those people who have little faith in accomplishing your commitments. Perhaps New Year’s wrysolutons might best describe the exercise for you.

Then there are those who reach too far and set New Year’s riskolutions. Not that it is bad to stretch beyond your reach but it is critical to determine how far you are likely to be able to stretch.

“Resolve” has, of course, two complementary meanings. From one perspective it means “determine to do!” From another it means “bring to a conclusion” or, perhaps, “accomplish.” The alpha and omega bound up in a single word. A resolution is not only something you determine to do, but something you also intend to accomplish.

It’s rather like a faith goal where the guiding principle must (as in the story of Goldilocks and the three bears) be “not too little, not too much, but just right.”

Not “too little” in that it only expresses what we feel we can do in our own strength. That implies we do not need to rely on God. Nor “too much” where, having accomplished little up to now, we set goals way, way beyond our ability to handle the results, even if God gives us what we desire…

No, “just right” is the ideal. Far enough beyond our reach that we are forced to rely on God to help us. But not so far that we could not handle the “harvest” when he blesses us.

Such resolutions start thus. “With God’s help we shall…”

Deo Volente, we used to put on posters in the “old days”… DV for short. You’d frequently see signs like the following…“Next Sunday we shall hold a meeting in his hall at 10:00 a.m. …DV”

Maybe it’s time we put God back into the equation. That sounds like a good resolution to me.