New Year's Resolutions

It’s that time of year again. New Year’s resolutions. Out of curiosity, I looked up the difference between a resolution and a goal. A resolution is “a firm decision to do or not to do something” and a goal is “an aim or desired result.” I prefer the idea of a goal. Deciding what to do is easy. Taking the steps to see results from that decision is harder.

So, for this year, here are my goals (in bullet form because I’ve been having trouble deciphering bullets lately and I need the practice):

• To finish the three book series I am currently working on before the Mount Hermon Writers’ Conference in mid-April. An ambitious goal since I am only about halfway through book one, but I am not including editing with this goal.
• To apply the editing recommendations after sending Sarah Cameron to an editing service.
• To submit, submit, submit Sarah Cameron after achieving previous goal.
• To read one book considered a classic each month.
• To read or re-read one professional book on writing each month.
• To do better at my daily Bible reading. Re: the daily part. (I suppose this is more of a resolution than a goal.)
• To run 20-30 miles per week minimum and run a second marathon some time this year.

I don’t know how successful I will be with all these goals, but I plan to try. Anyone else have goals they want to share?

Fighting Discouragement

Lately, I've been dealing with the feeling of discouragement. I have no external reasons to feel discouraged. No negative comments. No rejections. So this feeling is all in my head. Or, more accurately, this feeling is from Satan. And how is Satan having this success? Probably because I have not been discussing my writing future with the only one who will give me a writing future. Yep, my prayer life needs some work. Every Sunday my preacher brings up prayer in his sermon and I'm starting to think he might as well start pointing his finger at me

So I'm trying to fix my problem. With prayer, of course. And after twenty years of a relationship with God, why am I still surprised to find him listening? I know this may have been a coincidence, but later in the day, after I had asked God to help me fight this feeling that I should give up because Sarah Cameron fails because of xyz, I pulled up behind a truck at a stop sign. This truck had the usual Alaska bumper stickers, since it was in Alaska. One mentioned Palin and another said something about hunting. But one bumper sticker was somewhat out of place. It was a Chicago Cubs bumper sticker. Now Sarah Cameron lives in Illinois and she is a Chicago Cubs fan. So was it simply a coincidence that a truck in Alaska, with Alaska plates, should be in front of me with a bumper sticker for Sarah Cameron's favorite baseball team? Or is this one of God's red flags telling me that he hasn't forgotten about her and neither should I? Either way, no matter what my inner demons tell me, I am not giving up.

Dieting and Writing

Writing and dieting have a lot in common. Starting a diet usually brings changes for the immediate family. Old favorite dishes get low-fat make-overs, a certain food is present at every meal or an entire new menu is tested out. Friends and extended family who know of the dieting efforts will cheer and encourage. But the only person who truly cares about the diet is the dieter. And when Ben & Jerry start calling or a trip through the drive-thru sounds easier than cooking, giving up seems easy. After all, no one else will really care.

Writing often feels the same. Meals are affected (anyone else have all the delivery places on speed dial?), family and friends encourage, but when that wall looks too tall to scale or too thick the knock down, the only person who can push through is the writer.  Giving up won't matter to anyone else.

I've conquered dieting in the past, though lately I'm having some trouble. Can I blame the scale? And I'm working to stay on top of the writing. Some days, the easy way out is appealing. Who will really care if quit or don't follow through on getting Sarah Cameron published? But it all comes down to what I want and what I am willing to fight for. So whether it is resisting those Christmas cookies or pushing through the fear of failure, I'll keep fighting.

Looking Beyond the Negative

Why is it that we tend to focus on the negative instead of the positive? This appears to be a universal problem. Television comedies often take a main character and send him/her on an obsessive mission to change one negative opinion. Take the show Gilmore Girls, for example. On one episode, Sookie, a chef, receives a rave review, but, because her “magic risotto” is not praised beyond “good,” she develops a compulsive need to discover who the critic is and prove to him how amazing the risotto really is.

I am struggling with this same intense desire to prove myself to a specific, yet anonymous, individual. I recently entered a contest and received a great score. Out of three judges, two scored me very high, but one scored me very low. The low score was thrown out, yet I am hung up on that low score. Why? What is it in human nature that makes us obsess over where we’ve failed instead of basking in where we’ve succeeded?

Perhaps it’s our need for a savior. If we simply accepted our failures and only focused on our achievements, we’d never recognize a need for salvation. And, on a less spiritual plane, we’d never try to improve in other aspects of our lives if we never recognized room for improvement.

Now, we do need a balance. To let failure eat us up to the point of being unable to focus on anything other than our failures would be destructive. But never recognizing a need to change or improve would be equally destructive. So, I will strive to improve where there is collective agreement that I need to do better and I will let go of the desire to prove to one anonymous stranger that I can meet his/her standard. And a little chocolate might help too.

Faith

When I still lived under my parents’ roof, I had more faith in God. Before I entered the real world and became assaulted by things like bills and responsibilities, I trusted God to take care of things. Often, on Sundays, I discovered I had less than $5 to my name and I would have plans to go to the movies or do something else that required all the cash I had. So, I’d be faced with two choices. Keep all the money so I could have fun later, or put it in the collection plate and trust that God would take care of my fun plans. Usually, I’d drop it in the collection plate and God always came through. I might have to spend two hours mowing the lawn to earn the money, but he provided the opportunity.

Then I became an adult and I could no longer earn that extra five bucks by something as simple as mowing my own lawn. However, recently I’ve begun seeing God taking care of things if I simply trust in him without attempting to make things easier. One area is the ladies’ Bible study I host. A part of me wanted to be really selfish this year and quit hosting it. I wanted those four to five free hours to myself so I could have extra time to write. But I didn’t believe that’s what God wanted. So Bible Study is on the calendar for every Tuesday and oddly enough this fall, I’ve had more free Tuesdays than busy ones.

And other small events have cleared themselves up without my assistance. My husband unintentionally double booked me one day this week. He didn’t have a chance to reschedule and the appointment really needed to be taken care of. So, I figured I’d deal with it somehow. Except God took care of it first by canceling one of the conflicting appointments. Funny how that worked out.

“Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways acknowledge him and he will make your paths straight.” (Proverbs 3:5-6)