It’s a new year. I mean yeah of course it is. That’s what happens, days and days and days go by and soon they add up and the next thing you know it’s been weeks or months or even years. The problem is as all those days and months and years pile up life happens and if you’re not careful, if I’m not careful it’s easy to look back and wonder. What the heck. How did I get here? Am I really? Did I just?
That’s the thing about a new year, it makes us look back, not just at the year we just ended but at all the years, and in looking at all those years it’s so much easier to see all the times that the wheels came off, that the choices were wrong, that the circumstances could have been, or should have been or would have been if only. I’m not sure why I do that. I mean that’s not really accurate. I know why I do it. People like me, tend to worry more about other people liking us than we should. We worry more about what we can’t do than what we can. We have long ago taken down the mirror in our minds and replaced it with a gothic portrait of ourselves as we want to be seen, and every time we look at what should be a mirror that can show us areas that can be improved, that need work and can then, at a later time, show us progress, we actually look at that portrait and soon it is covered with all our failures, all our bad choices, all our ugly parts, all our bad things, all our sins real and imagined. The worst part is, we can see portions of the painting underneath but it’s getting covered over more and more by things that we add. There are times that those things are legitimate, but many times those things are perceived. We are our own worse critic.
I can almost promise you that anyone who has ever stood in front of a group of people and talked for a living has this same situation going on, especially the ones that are supposed to be breaking down religious texts and helping people grow in their faith. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not just those people. Arguably comedians do it, motivational speakers, lecturers all of them struggle.
The thing is, in order to be good at stand up, or preaching, or motivational speaking, or lecturing, you have to have a well of emotions to draw from, at any moment, if you’re good at what you do, you can draw from sadness, or joy, from anger, or melancholy, or indignation, pride, a bit of arrogance, sarcasm or humor. You have to have that well and then you have to know when and how to dip into it. To read the room and to know the timing the beats and where a story or point will have the most impact.
The point is when you’re good at it, when it works, there’s nothing like it. It’s like a drug, and when it’s all going the way it’s supposed to, you hold that group of people in that mysterious place woven of words and inflection and tone and emotion. But there is a price. A price that you pay every time you do it, especially when you are doing it well and it is that price that can take its toll on you in ways that can be destructive. That destruction looks different for everyone. No ones personal Armageddon looks the same as any other persons, many times they are wars fought in secret, slowing tearing apart the real person that is behind the public image, sometimes they are wars that start out in the trenches but soon blossom in to full blown mushroom clouds that can be seen from miles around.
All of this brings me back to the idea of what the New Year is supposed to be. We’ve all been told that at 12:01 AM on the first day of January things can and should be different. Even though we know better. Even though every other 12:01 has found us wanting, maybe this year. Maybe this year can be different, maybe this year we can do that thing we’ve been putting off. We can actually have that clean slate we promise ourselves and others. We can start fresh and write not just a new chapter but a whole new story. One that has us taking a hatchet to that portrait, hanging that brand new floor length mirror, facing 12:02 with the knowledge that we are not the sum of our past but we are who we choose to be now.
That all sounds amazing, and yet we know better, we all know better, it’s not true is it. We don’t really chop up the portrait, the mirror isn’t floor length, at best it’s a 12’ by 12’. We are doing it again we are dipping into that well and weaving those words to ourselves and it’s great until it isn’t. Until reality sets in, until all that stuff that we tell ourself doesn’t matter comes back and taps us on the shoulder waiting for us to turn and when we do we find ourselves falling into the too wide grin of something all together not ok that should have no power over us and yet still is able to get us in the end. The ever present jump scare that we fall for every time.
Instead of New Year new you, wouldn’t it be better to say something more realistic. Like.
Last year was hard, in fact a lot of years have been hard. Sure there have been really awesome things that have happened, there have been good things in life, and there have been really bad things, there have been times that crawling under the covers was preferable to waking up, that the decisions were the wrong ones, not just bad but wrong. All of these things are true, just like they will be true in the next 12 months. Instead of promising myself a new me, I’m going to ask the one who made me to work on the parts of me that need worked on the most. I’m going to accept that He may not work on what I want Him to or think He should work on. I’m going to learn to live with the bad stuff from before and the good stuff. I’m going to walk every day trying my best to be more like Jesus and less like myself.
That’s what I want to do this year. That’s what I’m going to do this year. I won’t be dipping into that well, it’s likely that I’ll never dip into it again, and that’s okay. In some ways it’s almost a relief, but if I’m honest in many ways it’s a big ball of sad that the one who made me is helping me deal with every day
