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Stephen Johnson
Stephen Johnson

A New Year, a new resolve

By  Stephen Johnson, Youth Speak News
  • December 27, 2013

New Year’s resolutions. Those three words are on everyone’s minds come the end of December, and even in the first few weeks of January. They are bandied about, handed around like so much Christmas fruitcake, and then, like said fruitcake, are forgotten or thrown away the moment the year actually gets going. But yet, so much angst and hand-wringing goes into the making of these resolutions.

So much time is spent discussing how we will change, how we will stop this and start that, how we will lose 10 pounds or how we will spend more time with our loved ones. Whatever the resolutions are, it seems they are forgotten soon after all that resolving. It is a bit like painting a picture and then stuffing it away into storage.

Why do we make resolutions, then, if we are so quick to get rid of them? Would it not be easier to have no desire for change?

Genuine change is hard, and therefore we often have no real desire to commit to it. And this is something I struggle with, even though I may want to change.

I, like many others, suffer from spiritual inertia; a soul at rest tends to stay at rest.

God is willing to help us, but by free will it is up to us to start, to de-ice our engines and get going on the highway of life. In the coming year, I want to continue to get stronger in my faith, but unless I work on that, unless I really get down to praying and evangelizing, my goal statement is, as popularly said, “vanity, and chasing after wind.”

We also make New Year’s resolutions to brag to ourselves and to others. It is a real trap: once we say we will do something, others will think, “How good of you!” and we will think “How good I am!” and then we will leave it at that. But it is still action, not words, that are most important. For example, say you hired a contractor who kept promising he would finish your roof, but that roof is still unfinished and now the snow is coming in. Like the contractor, we are guilty of making promises we do not really want to keep. It is always tempting to take the easy way out, to not change. Releasing ourselves from our doubts and temptations is the challenge.

After the Christmas and New Year’s parties are over, the last thing anyone wants to do is go back to more mind-numbing, slow-paced work. I dread a return to university and more essays and papers. Life, however, is all about work and we only rest once we reach God in Heaven. But before you throw out that resolution you are making, remember that if your roof still has a hole in it, you will let in all sorts of inconveniences and damages if you do not fix it.

(Johnson, 20, is a Concurrent Education student at Glendon College in Toronto’s York University.)

More in this category: « Kindness, not commercialism DIY devotion »

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