Do you do this too? Each year I make my New Year's resolutions, but without planning to, I set New Year's hopes too. I picture myself at the following new year, happily contented, having received my heart’s greatest desires.
When I was single, it was the desire for a husband. Maybe this year, he will come. I couldn’t see “him” anywhere and yet I would imagine myself married by the following new-year, or at least with a potential young man in sight by then. Maybe “This Year” was holding him in the wings.
But marriage didn’t cure this hope-setting habit. This year I desire to have another child. So, predictably, I picture myself excitedly telling my husband we’re pregnant, or pushing a stroller into church. Maybe this year.
In a meditation by this title from her book, Keep A Quiet Heart
“Will the young woman find a mate? Will the couple have a child? Maybe this year will be the year of desire fulfilled. Perhaps, on the other hand, it will be the year of desire radically transformed, the year of finding, as we have perhaps not yet truly found, Christ to be the All-Sufficient One, Christ the ‘deep sweet well of Love’” (page 49, emphasis mine).
This year I’m setting a new hope along with my resolutions, that 2006 might be a year of desires radically transformed. “Lord, this year, would you please dissolve all my desires into a single one: to know You. Please tear down all the idols of my heart that I set up in a row at the new year. Please give me an all-consuming passion to know you, a consistent joy in the forgiveness of my sins, and a constant delight in the glory of Christ. May this be a year of finding you to be the All-Sufficient One.”
“But whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ. Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord” (Philippians 3:7-8a).
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