NEW YEAR, NEW ME?

January often marks the beginning of new habits, resolutions, and renewed hope for people. That has never really been the case for me, but I have often been encouraged to participate in choosing a word, starting a new workout plan, or a new Bible reading plan. Often, I have jumped on the bandwagon, especially the new Bible reading plan. There have been several years that on January 1st, I sat down with my Bible and started the long journey of reading the Bible in a year. Some years, I made it, and many, I did not. Every time I started and missed a day, got behind by several days, and ultimately gave up, I felt like such a failure. I love God; shouldn’t I be able to spend fifteen minutes a day reading about Him and who He is? Shouldn’t I be able to overpower the desire to sleep an extra fifteen minutes, watch one more episode, or scroll one more time through posts I’ve already seen? My failure to be perfect in my reading plan left me feeling like I had zero discipline and was failing not only myself but God, so I would give up and quit. In the past, quitting my reading plan led to a feeling of disconnect in my relationship with God and shame that I couldn’t seem to manage what so many others could. But last year, something different happened.

Over the last few years, anxiety has crept its way into my life, well, maybe not crept in so much as stormed in like a tornado. At the end of 2020, I started, seemingly out of nowhere, having the occasional panic attack, which turned into my body and mind living in a constant state of fear that something terrible was coming around the corner and that I was going to be left without support and unable to manage it all. I started seeing my counselor more regularly and applying the things I was learning in my counseling master’s program, and I started taking a low dose of anxiety meds. It all helped, and in a year or so, I felt like I could stop the meds and would be able to use the coping skills I’d learned to manage the anxiety that still lingered. For the most part, that was accurate, and I’ve been in a much stronger, healthier space, but suddenly, last fall, a lot of that anxiety came rushing back like a spring flood. I started to question many things, including my desire to be a counselor. But God…I love that phrase…But God, there is so much hope in it. But God started to give me clearer glimpses of the big picture, and while I want to say something in me prompted me to begin praying every time I was driving alone; I know it was Holy Spirit, and every time I prayed driving too and from work, errands, etc. I started to find that connection again. When January of 2023 rolled around, I set out on another mission to read the Bible in a year, this time in chronological order, which, as far as I got, was a really interesting way to read it. True to form, about halfway through the year, I got so far behind on one of my trips that I just stopped. But this time, the prayer didn’t stop. This time, even though I knew I was not going to meet the goal of finishing it in a year, the desire for perfection didn’t completely derail me. This time, God used other things to show me his character and help me unpack some of my baggage, beliefs, and fears. Even though I didn’t perfectly or even close to perfectly do the thing I felt He’d put on my heart and mind to do, He kept showing up because I kept showing up in prayer on my drives to work, in times of fear and anxiety, and with thanksgiving for the abundance He’s placed in my life.

At the beginning of 2024, which snuck up on me, I didn’t take time to look back over the last year or to think about what I hope for this year, but slowly, over the first few weeks of 2024, I have started to notice some new things. I have grown increasingly less comfortable with apathy about life; my thought processes about several pretty major life issues have shifted from it’s their fault to seeing where my fault in this issue is in addition to the fault of others and the things that I have always used as my down time activities are actually sucking the life out of me and keeping me from actual experiences. So what now? I have these new insights, but things don’t change overnight; I’m not suddenly living a perfect, disciplined life. In fact, I have been highly imperfect in the first few weeks of 2024. I desire change, but sometimes, it feels like the rhythms are too deeply ingrained to overcome. Just as I began to wallow in the feelings of stuckness, God started to open my eyes to other places where change was happening. He began reminding me through other people, through books, and through my thought processes that change has been happening; it’s just been on the inside, and it’s been slow enough that it’s almost imperceptible. For example, as I prepared for a small group study, I got hit with a God-sized “open your eyes” moment. We were going to be talking about the Armor of God, so I went back to the workbook from a previous time studying that passage of Ephesians, and as I read through the parts I’d highlighted, the responses I’d given to questions, and the scripture itself, I realized just how much God has done in the years since I last studied it the first time. As I pondered over my notes, I realized that at the time of their writing, the most significant pieces of armor for me felt like the Shield of Faith and the Sword of the Spirit. I was about to fight one of the most challenging battles I’d ever fought and didn’t even know it, but looking back at the time that’s passed, I wholeheartedly believe that the Belt of Truth has been the piece of immense growth and has shown God’s faithfulness the most. In the last few years, God has chipped away, sometimes with a jackhammer, at many places in my life where I believed a lie of the enemy, and He has replaced those with such truth. The truth about who He is, who I am, and what it means to live and love like Him. As I begin stepping out into a new career as a counselor and a coach and living from enough rather than striving, I can see how vital being grounded in His truth will be while taking steps into the scary unknown. The final note on my video guide from the study is, “He will often ask you to gird yourself in truth in some area right before He moves you forward in an area that will take a ton of faith.” When I wrote those words from Priscilla Shirer, I had no clue how accurate they would be in my life or how easy it could be to miss recognizing them.

So, as we continue through this time of year that seems to be all about change and new beginnings and almost always ends in feeling like a failure, don’t forget to take some time to look for the almost imperceptible changes that are already happening in you. Look for places where God has been stripping away the lies of the enemy and replacing them with His truth.