Happy New Year! I wish each of you new and improved grace antennae: the better to recognnize and accept moments of grace, the better to recognize moments when you are called to be an agent of grace. May you get all of God’s signals.

I wish that for myself too. I’m trying to figure out a way to weave that wish in with my resolutions. Last year I had three resolutions:

1. Don’t try to get anywhere
2. Don’t try to prove anything to anyone
3. Don’t try to save anybody

They worked out pretty well. So well, in fact, that I am considering keeping them again this year. I did try to get somewhere at my work (so far no progress) and with my poetry (some progress, perhaps not visible to the external world). But that resolution helped me to keep the emotional stakes low in both cases.

It seems disingenuous to have only negations in my list, but I had to invent some way to thwart unhealthy ambition. I may need to spend many years deliberately NOT striving, in order to overcome the soul-shriveling effects of my many years of scrabbling and scraping. I’m trying to learn how to live joyfully and responsibly in the world –without idealism. Ten of my last 12 years or so were fueled almost entirely by ambition and idealism, with corrosive effects. I wanted to be a crusader for God! I wanted to save the world! Time after time, I found my works bearing very little fruit. My family and friends would say, “Wow, I could NEVER do that! More power to you!” Which I interpreted as “You are crazy. You’re on your own.” Nor did God seem interested in backing my up in my efforts to bring sustenance and repair. Where were the miracles, the insights, the breakthroughs, the provision?

With each passing year I felt more and more like I had been cast adrift in a boat with just a canteen and a loaf of bread. Alone and far away from everything and everyone that could help me. My response was to just get angrier and try harder. You know how sometimes in a relationship, one person will do something selfless, not out of love, but out of a desire to prove he or she is a better person? A sort of moral nose-thumbing? Well, that was me in the boat. I decided to take the little bread I had and feed it to the gulls. “Ha, ha, God! Take that! Even if You won’t feed these gulls, I will! Who’s got the high ground now, huh?!”

I was so mad. And here’s the part where I’m supposed to say how I had some kind of realization and now I am on a much better path, etc, etc. All I can say for sure is that everything needs to get knocked down before Jesus can build up something strong and true. I’ve been through the knocking down part, I think. Most of the anger is gone. Most of the expectations are gone. Now me and the Holy Spirit are just raking the terrain flat for awhile.

Yeah, I’m going to stick with those resolutions for another year. Hang out with my canteen in this little boat and see what happens. That sounds pretty good.

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