By Steve

2008
Did you make a New Year's resolution?

I usually don't put much into this annual tradition of setting myself up for failure. I have never kept a resolution I've made nor do I know of anyone who has. What I do hear every year are the stats about how quickly we fail. Some just days, others last weeks and most of us have yielded our resolve after a couple months.

Maybe the reason why I (like many others) fail in our resolutions is because we don't put much into them. To resolve to do something means that you are determined, you mean it, your decision is thought out and has purpose. While poking around an online thesauras I discovered that the word courage is a synonym and half-heart an antonym of the the word resolution. Most years I make a half-hearted effort in my resolutions. This year I will have courage.

Like others, most years I resolve to do things like exercise and lose a couple pounds, read more, watch less TV, keep my house clean...
this year, I am taking a different approach. The other day Ali said to me that she had a feeling that 2008 was going to be a big year for us. What does she mean? I asked her too. She said that it was going to be our best year of marriage, that we would adopt our sponsor child Perez, we would return to Uganda...little things like that. We decided that these things would happen, but would not "just" happen, so we are making some goals. But these goals are not our resolutions.

Our resolution for 2008 is centered around the word stewardship. To be a steward means that we manage or care for something that belongs to someone else. To be a good steward of course means we do this well. What we are resolving to steward well this year, not half-hearted but with determination...and it will take courage (not the kind of courage it takes to ride a bike down a staircase, but the kind it takes to go against the norms). We want to be good stewards with our money and our time.

Even as I type I hear some thinking, not much different than making a budget and using a day timer. But it is, at least for us. We want to think differently about our money and time. Like we're stewards of them both, meaning that they are things that belong to someone else and we're just taking care of them. We want to think about money differently. Use it differently. Give it away differently. Spend differently. It's not just living by a budget but living by a different set of economics. And time too. We want to consider our time differently. How do we use it and spend it and waste it. And how can we give it away so as to make an investment with it. We are resolving, not just making a goal, but determining to work this out in our lives this year. I'm not even sure what it means to succeed. There is no completion date. It may not be measurable. But we believe this to be a resolution of purpose and significance. The only failure would be denying how Ali and I have both sensed this for our lives and not moving forward.