Jennifer Groft

It has been two months to the day since I wrote here last.  And a busy two months it has been.

We spent all of November finishing up my husband’s Christmas CD and preparing for his concert.  For him that meant finalizing all the recordings, arranging for the reproduction of the CDs and planning the concert music.  For me, this included doing the CD photography and artwork, putting together the template for the CD cover, making and cutting tickets, and helping with many random things along the way.  It kept us all frazzled and our house a mess for the full month of November.

Which left us with December to recover from the process and prepare for Christmas.  I had many thoughts I wished to share here about Advent and preparing our hearts for Jesus, but I am afraid they will have to wait for another year.

Today I am pondering the new start that comes with a new year and what new starts are all about.  I think it is our human inclination to want to always have a start and a finish to things.  Our lives naturally become separated by events that forever afterward define things that happen to us as Before the Event and After the Event.  It happens with wonderful things like the birth of each child or a move, and it happens with traumatic things as well, like an accident or a house fire.  In between those major happenings, we have little beginnings for a fresh start like Mondays or going to confession, and bigger ones like the start of a new school year and, of course, New Year’s Day.

And so here is my challenge to myself this year (and to you if you wish to take it), to embrace the fresh starts as they come via calendar or event, but to never be afraid to make one right at the moment I need it.  There is no reason that a Wednesday afternoon at 1:47pm is a bad time to make a fresh start.  It is a little less memorable, but just as worthy of being a day and time to become a better person.

So what are my goals for 2011?

The less specific versions are:
Study Scripture more and do more spiritual reading.
Pray more.
Keep my house at a higher level of clean.
Maintain and continue to improve our budget.
Be more present to my children, and stop living inside my own head so much.
Write more. (Which may conflict with the item above, and so will make time management very important.)
And to sum them all up, I hope to live my life more intentionally, taking note of the things I aspire to and the things I hope to weed out of myself and working towards those things.

Now if those aren’t pie in the sky, I don’t know what is.  Because as I have written this, there have been no less than two all out brawls between my children.  The first was over who is cleaning or not cleaning the family room and thus who should and should not be able to watch the movie tonight.  The second was the discovery of and blame for a giant smear of poop on the wall in the bathroom.  And I feel my lofty goals slipping way with the possible necessary revision into “I will not kill my children in 2011” and the extra difficult, “I will yell at least a little less.”

But there has to be some way for a busy, at-the-end-of-my-rope, mom like me to draw closer to God and form myself as a better person in the new year.  There is.  I can depend on a constant stream of new beginnings.  Those beginnings may involve a little backtracking in the way of Confession or apologies made, but a fresh start is always available to me.  And maybe if I practice a good fresh start enough times, some progress can be made.