Motivation

Today marks the fresh start of a new year. A blank page. An empty calendar to fill up with memories - good days and bad days, victories and defeats, successes and struggles. And this puts many of us in the single-minded focus of this one thing: 

Don't mess it up.

This is our chance. This is our time. There's nothing written here yet except what we choose to write. There's nothing but what we want this to be, so here's our chance to make it. 

The question I have for you is this: what do you really want?

The most popular resolutions to make this time of year are always the same: to manage finances better, to eat healthier foods, to exercise more, to stress less, to break bad habits or addictions. Those are the top ones. Very closely related are some relational goals - better marriages, better friendships, better presence in the life of those we love. 

Those are all well and good, but they aren't really what we want. 

Underneath all of our common resolutions, underneath all of the things that we say that we want to change about our lives, are other motivations. 

You don't want to eat healthier foods because you love healthy foods and you feel like you've been neglecting them. You want to eat healthier foods because you want a healthier body. You want a healthier body because you want to be able to engage your life in ways that you can't right now. So...the motivation is the engagement. What is it that you want to engage?

You don't want to manage finances better because you are so troubled by your own wastefulness or you're outraged by inflation. You want to manage your finances better because there is an area in your life where you are feeling your poverty. What is that area? That is your motivation. What part of your life are you looking to make richer? 

You don't want to break a bad habit because you suddenly realize how terrible a thing it is. You want to break your bad habit because it is keeping you from something you want more. That something you want more is your motivation. So..what is it? What is that thing that you want more? 

So often, we focus on the things that we want to change, but we're better off putting our energies on the things that we want to achieve or obtain. We spend our time figuring out how we want to change our lives, but our greatest successes will come when we focus on what changing our lives will allow us to do that we can't do right now. 

Resolutions shouldn't be about making things better; they should be about embracing better things. I know those sound like the same thing, but they're not. That very subtle difference is actually a very big one. 

So as you look at the blank pages, the empty calendar, the fresh start - ask yourself what it is that you really want this year. Don't settle for the small steps of how you might get there, but just go for it and embrace the big picture of what it is that you want. 

What kind of life do you want to fill those pages with? 

Go out and get that.