“Let’s take a good look at the way we’re living and reorder our lives under God.” Lamentations 3:40 (the message)
We are just past the turn of the year, that season when many of us make New Year’s resolutions. Have you? Perhaps you’ve decided that 2019 will be the year you finally get to the gym on a regular basis, or get your spending under control or learn a new language or lose 20 pounds.
I’ve done some of this goal-setting for myself in the past, with the predictable results that I fail to keep the resolution for more than a few weeks. That doesn’t mean I never accomplish a goal I’ve set for myself — I just never seem to accomplish the ones I set at New Year’s.
It isn’t just that we rarely actually keep these resolutions. In a 2007 post, Rev. Billy Graham wrote that most such resolutions “are little more than a ‘wish list’ — a series of things we’d like to change about our lives, but little more.” He also points out that they are often pretty self-serving — all about making ourselves thinner, stronger, smarter.
There’s nothing wrong with wanting to be better versions of ourselves, but we might consider who we are placing in charge of these better versions. Rev. Graham draws from Lamentations to suggest that our resolutions would be more valuable and more valid if we thought less about what we ought to do to “improve” ourselves and more about bringing our lives under God’s control.
Rev. Graham’s article puts me in mind of a meme I saw on Facebook recently, posted by a couple of fellow clergy members. The meme, attributed to Sheila Welsh, is about the phrase in Psalm 46:10 commonly translated as “Be still and know that I am God.” According to the meme, “be still” would better be translated as “let go.” I turned to my interlinear translation of the Hebrew scriptures, which offers “relax-you” as the meaning of the phrase. “Relax yourself” does suggest that you “let go.”
Perhaps the problem with New Year’s resolutions is that they try too hard to accomplish the wrong goal. Instead of setting goals to lose weight, get more exercise or be nicer to our mother-in-law, we might “let go” and ask God what goals God might set for us.
I assure you, if God sets the goal for you, God will also provide you with access to the means for accomplishing that goal, although it might take longer than the few weeks or months we manage to stick to our New Year’s resolutions.
If you’re still in the mood to set resolutions for 2019, perhaps you will consider following the course laid out in the verses from Lamentations 3 and Psalm 46. Examine your life. Who’s in charge? Is it you or is it God? If the former, follow the directions of Psalm 46: Relax! Let go and give the control to God.
Happy New Year!
— Reflections appears regularly on the religion page. The column features a variety of local writers, coordinated through the Monroe Area Clergy Group. Kathleen Rinear is associate pastor at St. John’s United Church of Christ, Monroe.
