I don't like New Year's Resolutions (but have one anyway)
I don't like New Year's resolutions. I'm not entirely sure why. It seems to me that if something is a good idea at New Year's, it is a good idea before New Year's, so why not start now?
I suppose if it was a birthday resolution, I would feel better about the concept. I mean, turning 25 or 30 or 40? THAT'S a milestone that might make a difference to someone. But the dawn of the year 2007? That's just another day. Good ideas are good any day.
The title of my post is a bit misleading, because I don't really have a New Year's resolution, it just happened to be something I resolved around the time of New Year's. To be honest, I think I made this resolution sometime before Christmas.
I don't want to go into too much historical detail about why I'm like this, but my internal spiritual life is much, much more radical than my external spiritual life.
So, for most of my life I've lived two lives. I live this life that people see - I show it at Church and at work. I show it when I go back and visit my family, or when I'm at a party. Everyone who has actually met me has seen this life. This is my outside life.
But inside, there lives another life. There lives a life that questions and struggles. There is a life that has slowly, over my meager 30 years, pieced together a way of thinking and living that seems to be foreign and radical to those who know my outside life. This is my inside life. It is a life that is hidden away.
I don't want to seem like a whiner, but because of several bad experiences I've had expressing the formulations of my internal life, it has been kept carefully locked away for fear of being rejected, misunderstood, reprimanded, or worse. To live in constant fear of rejection by the very Church who's task is to sharpen me, exhort me, and love me (and I, them) is no way to live.
So, this is my resolution. I resolve take the risk of being radical in front of my church and my Christian friends. I resolve to put myself out there - exposing my secret and fleshy parts in the hopes that I can teach others, if only by example, some of the powerful and life-changing lessons God has taught me. I resolve to not act like it is okay that supposed "Christians" are totally complacent in their spirituality, but instead work to provoke them into the kind of life Christ lived by either disturbing them, or energizing them. I resolve to be the change I wish to see.
I have no idea what will happen. My church might run me off. My provocative comments might get me into trouble. Or, I might find a group - a very small group - who, like me, want to go deeper than "church" can take us. It's time to take the risk.