A New Year

(Part 1 of a undetermined amount of parts welcoming in the New Year)

Welcome to 2010! As usual, I haven't written all semester, so it didn't really make sense for me to write up an entry about resolutions for the new year, but some habits just don't die.

I just flipped back to my entry from 2009, where I critiqued my previous resolution and set some new ones. So here were the goals for 2009:

-Practice my clarinet more

I seem to make that a goal every year, and the same thing happens. Nothing changes. To top it off, I spent nearly 6 weeks away from my clarinet this summer.

-Do my laundry more often so it doesn't take half a day

Well, it partially worked. I did manage to do my laundry more often at the beginning of sophomore year, but it still took a while, and by the end, I ended up bringing my laundry home for Thanksgiving and Christmas breaks.

-Consistently keep my room clean

This was almost an epic fail. My room will forever show the amount of stress in my life - the more stress, the more clutter, until I get so stressed, I drop everything and clean up my room at the most inconvenient time possible.

-Create a study/play schedule that gets me to bed at a decent hour

If I remember correctly, I didn't even bother to attempt such a thing.

-Take more personal time, to simply listen to music or journal

That finally started happening a month or so ago, and I did do a lot of journaling while in Europe, but this will be a continued project

-My goal for the summer of 2009: see how many works of CS Lewis I can read in one summer

This may be the first resolution I was actually able to keep!! I read 6 of Lewis' books, and started a 7th. I'm quite proud of that accomplishment!

-Finally be able to reconcile my past with my present and trusting God to help me move forward

I can honestly say -"what was I thinking?!" That is not something that I can simply make as a New Year's resolution and hope that it will come true.


When thinking about the new year, I kept thinking about change. What I wanted to do to change myself in some way, to better myself. But I think I have it all wrong. Instead of looking to create a better me, I should be looking for ways to discover my true self. Or rediscover..

I've thought a lot about what I think is wrong with me, and ways I could change. Things that I desperately want to change about myself. My compulsive perfectionism is one huge part of that. I've come to realize how much of a destructive force that has been in my life since, oh, about 7th grade. Anytime I didn't meet the standards I had set for myself, I would beat myself up terribly about it, and then tell myself I just had to work harder and focus more. And so I did. I kept chasing after these standards till someone, who I thought had a good piece of advice, suggested that my standards were too high. So I lowered by standards, thinking that then I would be content. But I hated myself even more for having lowered the standards, and became stressed out about...not stressing out! I've decided that the person who told me to lower my standards is, in the nicest, most Christian way of putting it, an idiot. As a compulsive perfectionist, my self-esteem and self-worth has been completely tied into my schoolwork and my music. Lowering my standards did nothing to change that, and in fact made the situation much worse. There's nothing wrong with having high standards, but it's my reaction to my failure to reach those standards that's the problem. A failure in schoolwork shouldn't devastate my sense of self-worth. So this year, I'm trying something different. I'm going to admit that I have a competitive edge, and I'm going to aim for the best that I can possibly do - but in a number of categories (which I won't get to in here). I'm going to aim towards being well-rounded, but I'm going to push myself to be the best well-rounded person I can be.

The other part, involving my self-esteem and self-worth I got a bit of insight from today during church. One of my professors (Dr. Pearse) from school came to speak at a friend's church, and I always love having the opportunity to annoy him, so I heard him "preach" on "Why The Rest Hates The West" (he has a book out by that same title - I would completely recommend it!). In the midst of a number of points I am already familiar with (having read his book and survived his course), but one thing stuck out to me that I didn't catch the first time. In the modern West, we've lost our sense of identity, and need to fill it somehow (usually by consumerism). The freedom that we so greatly value has freed us from the ties which would have given us a grounding for answering the question "who am I?". He compared that to the great hymn writer, Issac Watts, who wrote

"When I survey the wondrous cross
on which the Prince of glory died,
my richest gain I count but loss,
and pour contempt on all my pride.

Were the whole realm
of nature mine,
that were an offer far too small;
love so amazing, so divine,
demands my soul, my life, my all."

Contrast that with our Western self-loathing. We might think Watts an egomaniac for thinking that the best gift he could give God was Himself. But in truth, it's because he had a proper view of himself. We are created in the image of God. We have greater worth than the whole realm of nature. Driving back from church, I was listening to David Crowder's Church Music album, and the song came up "We Are Loved". The chorus is

"O we are loved
We are loved
And it's quite enough that
We are loved"

For perhaps the first time, I'm starting to come to grips with this idea of our worth driving from being created Imago Dei, and that God loves us. For years I kept thinking that when people told me to seek my worth from God, I was suppose to seek applause from Him, just as I did from everyone else. But that's not it at all.

So this year, it's about becoming my real self, working my way through the lies I've believed for too long. It's still confusing at this point, and there's a long way to go, but this is certainly going to be an interesting year.