Word

It's that time of year again when people are posting about their word for the new year. Well, actually, it's past time. I'm late. But I have been thinking about it since before the calendar and the year changed. The same word came to me each time I thought or prayed about it. But I didn't want that word. It's so ordinary but also feel accusatory and judgmental. It makes me feel inadequate to need this word. It reminds me that I don't have all my stuff together.

Which, of course, I don't. None of us does.

"The object of a new year is not that we should have a new year. 

It is that we should have a new soul."

-G.K. Chesterton

Sometime around the first of the year I saw this quote. How does one get to be the kind of person who is quoted, by the way? Just wondering. For a friend.

Anyway, he's right. So if my word for the year means a new soul, then I really just need to embrace it.

My word for 2020 is self-control.

There, I said it. It's official. I can't change it now. It's out there for all to see and to hold me accountable.

"Self-control is the very best way to go

so I think that I'll control myself."

Ever since hearing this word was my word for 2020, this stupid (sorry, Victor, I'll re-do) cheesy phrase from a childhood song (anyone else remember the Music Machine songs about the Fruit of the Spirit? Sounds so easy.

But it's not. So here I am going into 2020 with a lack of self-control in certain areas of my life, praying for Jesus to step in and help me grow in this area so that in 365 days (give or take a few), I can look back and say that yes, I did indeed gain a new soul in the first year of the new decade.