Setting Goals for 2019

This is the time of year when everybody around me seems to be setting goals and filling in their day planners.

Honestly, I am not one of those people who gets a thrill when they open their new day planner and begins to fill those blank pages with big plans for their upcoming year.

I mean I have set goals in the past, and my husband and I are in a family business in which we have yearly planning meetings — but I tend to drive the poor guy crazy because I really don’t like to overplan things.

My goals for our business are basically “make enough money to pay all of our bills and not have to resort to eating cat food to make it through the year”.

Really. That about sums up my goals in a nutshell.

And it’s not because I’m one of these people with zero ambition. I like to think of myself as somebody who has ambitions and dreams and tries to achieve them.

But I tend to think that people who are always making plans and never straying from them may end up limiting what God can do in their lives.

I am not saying everybody who makes plans for their 2019 are intentionally limiting God — you need to have some some sort of plan in order to achieve just about anything in life.

But I guess I feel like planning too much of our lives ahead of time can hold us back and restrict God’s ability to work in our lives.

I mean we all tend to be control freaks.

And the funny thing is that we are so good at seeing the “control freak” in the guy next to us — but rarely do we see it in ourselves as clearly as we do in others.

So what if, before we put together our spread sheets and made our plans this year, we took time to sit before Jesus and sincerely ask, “Lord, what do You want for me in this year?”

What if we took our notebooks and planners and wrote down what we felt He was whispering gently to our hearts?

What would those plans look like?

This morning, I sat down to pray. I took out this sophisticated faux marble journal that my kids got for me for Christmas.

It’s one of those butt-kicking kind of journals. They type of journal that belongs to CEO’s of fortune 500 companies — the type of journal that says, I’m a person who gets things done.

As I opened it on Christmas morning, my kids actually told me it was for my blog so I could write down my ideas for posts and look legit.

Which is funny and sweet and clearly they aren’t completely hating the fact that I have a blog.

So I took out that faux marble, super-sophisticated journal and I decided I was going to make some plans for 2019 during my prayer time.

I was expecting revolutionary ideas and plans to come flooding to my brain.

After all, it was a marble journal — the type that surely would contain great battle plans for taking the world by storm in 2019.

What I got instead was a blank page with the words, “2019 Goals” written at the top.

I sat there praying and thinking and literally nothing came to mind. Not one plan.

Not family goals or weight loss goals or business goals or blog goals or any type of goals at all.

Nothing. Just a blank page.

So I grabbed my fancy markers that I bought last year when I swore I would become an amazing hand-lettering artist.

There was just one little problem — my hand-writing is horrific. Horribly horrific.

But no matter.

Surely holding these artistic pens in hand would inspire me to see the beautiful path that God had in mind for me in the next year.

Only they didn’t have any effect at all. I still stared at the blank page in front of me, wondering what the heck I should set as my goals.

Literally nothing came to mind.

And then it came to me bright and clear — clearer than any thought I had for the past half hour.

“Surprise me, God. Surprise ME!”

And then I became terrified at the prospect: to give God permission to surprise me.

To say to Him. I trust You. Surprise me.

No plans for myself. “Just surprise me, Lord, I trust you”.

That was literally the only thing that came to mind, and it scared the heck out of me.

I know the stories of the Saints. The ways they suffered. The way they poured out blood and sweat and tears to love God.

None of those stories sound too fun to me.

Except maybe that story about St. Teresa of Ávila, in which her carriage fell over in a muddy path and she turned to God and said, “Well, if this is the way you treat your friends, Lord, no wonder you have so few of them”.

Now that story — that I can relate to.

It makes me wonder, “Do I really believe that God is good and that He loves me and that He wants me to be happy?”

Do I?

I think that the honest answer is “Yes” and “no”.

Truth be known, I am scared to give him permission to work in my life in a radical way.

Truth be known, it scares the heck out of me.

I am far more comfortable controlling all the things in my life than to let that control go and to say, “Lord, I trust you. I say yes”.

Now that is a radical goal for 2019.

I tried to think of other goals, but that was it. That was my goal. The only goal.

The goal of my year was to let God surprise me. Eek! What the heck was I thinking?

I have to admit, there’s a wee bit — honestly, a lot of — fear attached to what I wrote in that journal.

Sometimes it’s hard to see the goodness of God amidst all the darkness of the world. Sometimes it’s hard to believe that He really loves me and wants the best for me.

Sometimes I think I need to make all the good things happen for myself…but not this year.

Praying and meeting God in the silence every day has taught me that I need to trust more, to believe more, and to hope more in the loving God who created me because He loves me so darn much!

So this year, I’m taking a big leap of faith. I’m going to try to be brave and shut down every lie the devil has ever told me about God.

Every single one of them.

I’m going to arm myself with the Word and His Sacraments and prepare myself for the surprises that may come — because the surprises always do come, don’t they?

How about you?

Are you ready to trust that God loves you and wants the best for you in this upcoming year?

I think I am, but I’m also willing to accept that it could be a total train wreck.

That’s okay. God’s got this.

He’s awfully good at dealing with train wrecks like myself, and I’m willing to bet it’s going to be a pretty amazing ride.

So who’s with me?

Buckle up. It might be a bumpy ride, but here’s to 2019 and all the surprises that God will be throwing our way!

Sharing over at Kelly’s