How to avoid living a used year in a new year …

In a Peanuts cartoon strip Lucy once grumbled to Charlie Brown about the awful new year she was having. She complained that problems abounded, and she felt that difficulties were around every corner. Then she said, “I don’t think this is a New Year at all — I think we’ve been stuck with a USED year!”

Have you ever found yourself a few weeks or couple months into what was a new year, only to find yourself thinking like Lucy that perhaps you got stuck with a used year?

A root cause (not the only cause) for such experiences is going into a new year without any serious goals to pursue, only to end with the feeling of a “wasted year.” On the topic of wasted years, an unidentified writer offered this:

Someone once observed that a wasted life is really nothing more than a collection of wasted days. As God gives us life, each one of us starts the new year with the same number of opportunities — 365 — that we can choose to either use and invest in eternal things or allow to drift by without taking advantage of the gift we have been given. The difference between those who succeed and those who fail is not found primarily in talent but in diligence and effort.

Now, before you launch into a rant about how you’re not “one of those people” who make “New Year resolutions,” let’s face a reality about every single New Year. For each new year God gives you, you have a starting line and a finish line. And guess what: much of what happens between those two lines will come directly from the choices you make in that new year.

Not everything you experience will happen by choice.

God is still sovereign and is directly involved in our lives.

You’ll also have to deal with being splashed by the consequences of the choices some other people in your life make.

Yes, some things are beyond your control, and you’ll have to deal with them as they unfold throughout your new year.

But the truth is, you have a lot to say about what life in a new year will be like, and even more so when you approach the gift of another year of life with clear purpose, specific intentions, determined values for how you will live, and someone or others willing to collaborate with you.

In that case, sitting down and doing some praying, thinking, soul-searching, and dreaming isn’t a bad way to approach a new year so that you can enter into it with some goals worth pursuing … and crossing the annual finish line like you’ve live a NEW year well.

There are a number of ways to prepare yourself for another year of life, but let me offer you just one — yes, not a list of 10 steps or 15 things to do — just one question you can use to stir your thinking about 2024.

Ready?

Here it is: If Jesus wrote your New Year resolutions for 2024 for you, what would they be?

Have fun with that!

Scotty