New Year’s Resolutions

Many people make New Year’s resolutions. At the start of 2019 no doubt some of us will be planning to do one or more of the following:

• • more exercise
  • join a gym
  • start a diet
  • take up a new hobby
  • change jobs

The beginning of a new year is often the time when we look at our lives and consider what changes we would like to see in them. Unfortunately, New Year’s resolutions are often easy to make but harder to do!

During the last 12 months my church has been going through a challenging time. We are in the process of merging with one of our sister churches in our parish and appointing a new rector to lead both the new merged church and the parish. We were hoping to complete this in 2018 but it still has not happened yet.

I have found that it has been very easy to get distracted whilst awaiting the completion of the merger and new rector appointment. Endless speculation of what is going to happen and when is not ideal. Although I have prayed about the situation I have certainly lost focus myself.

Therefore, for me the most important New Year’s resolution is to get my priorities right and focused correctly. To that end I was pleased to hear that our parish will be starting a Christianity Explored course at the end of January. The leaflet that has been produced for the course contains the following wording:

“….. it is vital that we have an opportunity to focus our efforts and energies first and foremost into the rediscovery of what is referred to in the book of Revelation as our ‘first love’: that good news about Jesus which not only gave birth to us as Christian believers, but which we are called first and foremost to live out and proclaim to the world.”

Your situation might be very different to my one. However, I think for all of us it would beneficial to make our New Year’s resolution to rediscover our first love for Christ.