Back in January, I shared with you about the My One Word movement – that instead of making a list of New Year’s Resolutions, you prayerfully choose one word around which you will focus your year. At that point, I was still choosing my one word, based on lessons I learned in 2014 and where I felt I needed to go in 2015.
So, where am I at with all this today, mid-year?
Well, for one thing, I’ve kind of migrated from a My One Word purist to a combo My-One-Word-with-Goals stance.
I still love the whole My One Word idea – one word to focus on, to organize my year around. Perfect.
But I realized that while I still hate resolutions, I did want to set some goals in the different areas of my life. Part of that realization came from reading this article by Michael Hyatt in which he gives a very simple yet practical method for setting goals and checking them on a regular basis using Evernote, one of my ten favorite apps/websites. In a nutshell, he shows how to use Evernote to create a list of goals for your year, and then make a detailed note for each goal to help you track how well you are meeting that goal.
I am a list-maker by personality, and I love Evernote, so this totally resonated with me. I started making my list and came up with 20 goals for 2015. (Stay with me! It’s not as extreme as that sounds!) Some were small (“Read three books about classical education by 5/31/2015”) and some much larger. Some were related to establishing new personal habits, more along the lines of a resolution, and others were related to the direction I would like to see our Naomi’s Circle ministry head. Some seemed lofty, and others quite doable if I just set my mind to it.
At the same time, I was still considering my one word for the year and finally settled on the word abide, from the Bible passage in John 15:4: “Abide in Me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself unless it abides in the vine, so neither can you unless you abide in Me.” With the metaphor of a branch abiding in the vine, this verse talks about how it is impossible to accomplish anything good and lasting – spiritual “fruit” without abiding in Jesus. Exactly what it means to abide is fleshed out in the rest of the passage, and I decided that this needed to be my focus, especially with my list of things I wanted to do this year. I didn’t want to pursue those things in 2015 in my own strength or with my own idea of what needed to happen. I wanted to be abiding in God.
Back to my goals. I realized that my goals fell into several categories: personal habits, family, spiritual growth, writing, and pregnancy loss ministry, and I knew that in each one of these, I needed to remind myself to focus on the Lord, to pray, and to submit those plans to Him.
Enter a dear friend who introduced me to the idea of a vision board, in which you make a visual representation of your future desires and goals and put it up somewhere to remind you of what you want and why. For some, that is a poster of the car they want to drive, the condo they want to own, and the career they want to have. For others, it’s more along the lines of personal change.
Well, along with being a list-maker, I am a visual learner. I loved the idea. But I am also a 21st century digital girl, and went looking for a way to do it on my computer instead of with scissors and glue. What I found was a free vision board app for my iPad that let me create as many vision boards as I wanted. I combined images and text about the different areas of my life, all centered around My One Word, abide.
So what does all of this have to do with anything? Well, my digital vision boards are on my iPad and are something I look at nearly everyday, and I printed them out to have in my planner as well. They remind me to check my goals and, especially, to abide in Jesus, through prayer and Scripture reading and quiet time, as I pursue the things that are near and dear to my heart.
And, amazingly, some of those goals – like doubling the number of people subscribed to my blog – have already been accomplished much earlier in the year than I expected! Is it because of my focus? Who knows, but I don’t care either. What I am trying to do is to keep my eyes on what is most important and my heart tethered to Heaven, and as I do that I am excited about the possibilities for the rest of 2015!
Yes, it’s the summer time, but it is never too late to set goals and make a new start! What mid-year resolutions would YOU like to set for the rest of 2015? Share them in the comments below!
