REFLECTION//it's a little early to be saying this, but another year is about to go by before we know it

Last weekend, I went with a few friends from church on a retreat as part of a seminar called "The Course of your Life" As with most retreats, I did a lot of thinking, and as you can probably gather from the name of the book, I did a lot of thinking about... the course of my life.   I'm still trying to process a lot of the things we discussed, and it also reminded me of my new year's resolutions for 2012. 

I'm not sure when I started this, but somewhere down the road, I started to form the habit of writing big prayers at the beginning of the year, and then coming back at the end of the year and seeing what happened.  Granted, a lot of them are "goody two-shoes" prayers, like "Lord please help me to thirst for Your Word and desire it with all my heart" (although as safe as that sounds, it's actually probably one of the most dangerous prayers you can pray) or "God, help me to love my neighbors with Christ-like love this year".  But you know, I also put some of the shallow-est most outlandish requests in there too.  Don't get me wrong, God is in no way by any stretch of the imagination some sort of genie that we just shoot out requests to.  However, I do keep a habit of recording my prayer requests, because the crazy thing is that God answers them and is totally faithful to them.  A lot of times, when I look back to what I wrote, I'm so amazed that He answers prayers that I already forgot I prayed.  Imagine that! Sometimes the answer is yes, sometimes the answer is no, but what remains the same is He is more faithful to my prayers than I even am to my own.  

I am reminded of this, when I look back on one of the things I prayed about for this year.  I prayed that I'd learn that I could fight for things that I believed in and be able to take more risks. To not be afraid to rest more, pray more and not be afraid to pursue things even if it felt like I was starting from zero again.  I think I wrote these things as an ambiguous ideal that sounded nice, but I feel like I'm actually approaching a crossroads in which I am grappling with these things, and I wonder what is going to happen.  A little scary, but kind of exciting too.