I haven’t posted this year, and for most of last year. It’s kind of felt strange not posting. I beat myself up a bit for not taking this more seriously and for not putting in the work. When this year rolled in I felt that I needed to say something about a new year, new chapters, goals, preparation and planning with God, but January came and went then a full quarter of the year past by and now a half year and I still didn’t feel like giving the happy new year message. I just didn’t feel like any of it would be totally honest or different from previous years. And the thing is we all want the new year to be different from the previous one, especially after a year like 2020. We all desperately wanted this year to yield some much more pleasant and promising prospects and memories than we had in the previous year.
For me, I didn’t just want the date to be different I wanted things to be different. A popular quote that most of us would have heard or come across at some point is, “be the change you want to see”. What a powerful concept and something we can all attest to be true. Yet after a year we’ve just had, which seems to have spilled over into the current year, more than ever I sense the difficulty to break out and be the change. Not only is it difficult to seek change in a world that has faced a series of challenges that are beyond human control, but also to find change when all we want and all we talk about is for things to go back to normal. It’s exceptionally difficult to commit to change when we’ve all had a year where we were confronted with our demons. For the first time, many people actually sat at home and had time to really think about their careers, really think about their financial circumstances, really think about their relationships, their habits, physical and mental health and spiritual life amongst so many other things. In the course of examination and thinking, if we were honest, we would have found things that we liked and things we didn’t like. We would have patterns and habits that have always been there but sprung up to the surface after a few weeks to months of sitting at home and having nothing else to do.
Just the other day, I was watching a report on the BBC featuring normal people, working professionals, people who didn’t lose their jobs or were significantly affected by the pandemic through the death of a loved one or by contracting the virus themselves, who admitted to drinking more frequently and in larger quantities during the day. One middle aged man said that he didn’t notice how much alcohol he was consuming on a daily basis until his children pointed it out to him. He had gotten to the point where he couldn’t go through a day without drinking. It had become normal for him. He drank 2 beers and a bottle of wine every day, which worked out to be about 100 units of alcohol a week. The average maximum recommended weekly alcohol consumption is 14 Units.
His encouragement was that anyone who was drinking more, should get help, whether they were still functioning like he was or not.
I mention this not to cast judgment or to make anyone feel bad for slipping up, but to say it’s okay to look at our not so great side. Whatever your habits and practices are and have been over the pandemic months, that is your normal. You need to embrace all of it. The good, the bad and the ugly. You can’t change what you don’t accept. You can’t change a world that you are not willing to acknowledge and be part of. You must show up and participate in your change for you to be the change that you desire to see.
Some of us looked at our health and realised that we really needed to get off the couch if we were going to have lives beyond just surviving the pandemic. We realised that pandemic or not, we were lucky to even experience another day from the comforts of our living room, because truthfully, with the way we’ve been treating our bodies we haven’t earned the right. So, we decided to get on that bike, take that walk, do those crunches and run that mile. Others realised that the issues that cropped up in their marriage was as a result of not spending time together, not seeing each other for who they really were, and they are now working on being better. Others found that the damage in their relationship was to extensive to repair and they’ve began to make changes.
We have all been through something corporately and individually. We have all felt pain and sorrow, loss and addition.
I’ve been through my own discovery journey and yes, the person that I am today is not the person I hoped I would now be. But I know that the person writing these words is not the person I will still be in another 10 years. There are things that I want to change and there are things that I want to maintain. But I’m embracing me and noticing that I’ve changed, I’ve become someone else and I’ve decided that going back to become the person I was is not an option. Nothing good comes from dwelling on the past. Even if that past is full of rosy memories. It’s gone and done. I can only learn from yesterday and make tomorrow a better day. The future is a moving mark full of possibilities and new things to discover and conquer. I have an idea of where I’m going and a map in my hand to guide me, but when I get there I know that really being there will be different and feel different to what I imagined, because the map is only a picture of the real thing. But more so, I would have changed. The journey to the future would have changed me again, just the way the journey of the past changed me into who I am now. Once, twice, three times or more every year, I will tell myself, ‘Happy New Me!’, because even when times don’t seem to have changed much, I will.
We Grow in Faith 