I’ve never been big on New Year’s Resolutions. It seems to me that whatever would be worth resolving to do at the start of a year is something that I already should have been doing…and so deciding that I was going to start doing it now…just because the calendar changed…well…that just never felt right.

But there is no denying that Dick Clark’s Rockin Eve and the dropping of the ball in Times Square do provide a great opportunity for self reflection…for thinking about my life…about how I’m living it…and how I should be living it. Besides, we are linear people…we like beginnings and endings…we like parameters and boundaries…we like markers and milestones. So I suppose, if flipping the page on the calendar…or starting a whole new calendar for that matter…is what it takes for us…for me…to finally do the things I need to be doing in my life…then perhaps I shouldn’t dismiss the idea of New Year’s Resolutions so easily.

So after much thinking…and soul searching…and a little prayer…here are my resolutions:

• I will pray more…and I will love more.
• I will make more time for people…for relationships…and I will love more.
• I will open myself more to the presence of Jesus Christ in and around my life….and I will love more.
• I will appreciate more the gift of each moment whether seemingly spectacular or ordinary…and I will love more.
• I will be more of the man God created me to be…and I will love more.

Now I don’t know how far I will get with all of these…I don’t know how much progress I will really make…but there can be no doubt about my need to do these things. John spells it out pretty clearly in today’s readings:

Beloved, let us love one another,
because love is of God;
everyone who loves is begotten by God and knows God.
Whoever is without love does not know God, for God is love.
In this way the love of God was revealed to us:
God sent his only-begotten Son into the world
so that we might have life through him.
In this is love:
not that we have loved God, but that he loved us
and sent his Son as expiation for our sins. 1 John 4:7-10

I must love…and am only capable of love…because God first loved me. God is Love…and so how can I call myself a Christian and do anything else?

Of course I am still flawed…still weak…still incomplete. But as C.S. Lewis observes so poignantly:

It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad.

So despite my sinfulness, I have to press on…I can’t become complacent. I can’t continue going through the motions…okay just isn’t enough. And as Matthew West continues in his song:

I don’t wanna go one more day
without Your all consuming passion inside of me
I don’t wanna spend my whole life asking,
“What if I had given everything,
instead of going through the motions?”

So it’s time. Time to decide to be different. Time to decide to be better. If I want to fly…I first have to hatch. Father, please consider these resolutions the first cracks in my shell.