The New Year Starts NOW

Sometimes I wish life had a backspace button.

A little something I could click to back my way out of a string of days that feel wasted and have left me feeling like a waste of space.

I had high hopes for the first few weeks of 2014. After a month of holidays, travel and family I was ready to put two feet on the floor and hands to the task.

Let it be noted that I am a terrible patient. I hate being sick so when the beginnings of a sore throat started I mumbled and grumbled and prayed it wasn't so. Well, it was so and now the question has become SO?

How do you get your feet under you when time just seems to have gotten away?

My husband, ever the pragmatist, noted that Lysol claims to get rid of 97% of all germs on surfaces and that is a reasonable ratio to drive sales of their products. His point being that I have just as much of a year left and that shouldn't be reason to give up on plans, goals, dreams and motivation.

I know, I know...What kind of crazy person gives up a week in because of a cold?

{Raises hand. Hangs head in shame}

It was a really bad and horribly unproductive week. It left me feeling like an insignificant, incapable speck and that no good voice in my head was blaring as loud as ever.

For all my blabbing about grace it is in the muck that I still find how little grace I have with myself. 

I am far too quick to judge myself against a litany of to dos rather than extend grace to myself and the truth that God already has.  

My One Word for 2014 is "Embrace" so here I am to embrace that the first week of the year could use a do over, but in light of that physical impossibility and my lack of a time machine I'll settle for leaning into the grace that God goes before us in all things. He already new the first week would be a bust. Now I've got to lean hard on Him so that the other 51 weeks won't be.

Because that is really the issue, isn't it? I couldn't control what happened that first week, but God was never not in control. While I was berating myself for failures and having two left feet as I dance through life God was telling me that in Him all things are possible.

I'm sure some of you are wishing for a do over for the first bit of 2014. My husband offered me a restart on the year and I'm taking him up on it. A new chance at the new year is just what I need. I bet some of you are needing the same.

Permission granted.