Don't rock my boat - My plan for 2017

What a year it has been.  As we come to this point when it is time to ring in the New Year we usually fill our conversations with things like, “Next year will be the best yet.”  “I can’t wait to see what next year holds.”  “Nothing can be harder than what we just went through.”  Or the ever so popular, “This is the year I get in shape….”.  What is it about a number on a calendar changing, that elicits such ideas of hope, wonder, and often times unfounded confidence in circumstances that are really outside of our control?  I have found year after year, I get caught up in it to some degree. I have never been big on making resolutions.  I have never liked the pressure of feeling like a failure if I “fall off the wagon” of whatever I had promised myself to do.  I feel more often than not, we make resolutions, plans, and goals for the future based on this unspoken idea that if we will something enough, there will not be anything that can derail it.  Then when circumstances arise, whether in or out of our control we fall into this horrible trap of guilt, shame, and feelings of failure that leave us in so many ways, crippled, struggling to find our bearings and move forward.  We base our success or failures in a year based on our humanness and humanness always in one form or another fails us, because lets face it humanness is flawed.  No one on this planet has the ability to walk into a situation and perfectly predict all the variables and outcomes.  The greatest computer in the world could give you statistics, probability, variables, and every calculable scenario possible but it still can not account for the humanness factor.

 

This year has been arguably the most challenging one I have faced.  I have found myself on the highest of moments and the lowest of moments.  I have rejoiced and grieved, sometimes all in the same hour.  At this point last year my sister was engaged to the best guy in the world, I was pregnant with a surprise and looking so forward to the prospects of a complication free pregnancy and delivery, Mark was in a good groove for work, our family was looking forward to improved health for those struggling around us, the kids loved their school; the prospects and the possibilities were endless.  Then shortly after the New Year began it felt like it all began to crash.  First collision, we braced for impact, second collision, and we braced for impact, again, and again, and again.  It finally got to a point there was no more bracing; it was more akin to standing on a boat in the middle of a storm waiting for it to take you under.  But didn’t Jesus calm the storm?  When the disciples were on the Sea of Galilee fighting against wave after wave desperately holding on for dear life, waiting for the sea to envelop them, angry and confused calling on the Lord, what happened?  Had the Lord left them?  Was he absent? No.  He was there and in the moment of their greatest weakness the Lord called the wind and the waves to be still.

 

I imagine the disciples standing there in that boat drenched, terrified, rattled to their core with emotion, staring dumbfounded, thinking, “What?! What?  You could have stopped the storm this whole time, and you didn’t?  You could have kept us from having to do all that work…?  You could have made this so much easier for us!  Why?!”  And then after a moment, after they really began to process there emotions, they began to realize, “You could have stopped it, because you were in control all along.”  “You could have changed it, but you knew the outcome.”  “You were always here, you never left us.  You were here.”  The disciples had already seen Jesus perform miracle after miracle, they had shared in the highest, best, most exciting moments with him, then in an instant when the world looked dark and grim they became lost.

 

There is no easy way to deal with the trials that come our way; trials by their definition are never easy.  What I have learned this year is something Paul talks about in Philippians 4:12-13 when he says,

 

“I know how to be brought low, and I know how to abound.  In any and every circumstances, I have learned the secret of facing plenty and hunger, abundance and need, I can do all things through Him who strengthens me.”

 

That is what I learned this year and how I pray I can walk into next year.  This year I have learned how to be brought low and I have learned how to abound and never once in any of it was I alone, abandoned, left flailing on the boat.  I know without a doubt that 2017 is going to be a difficult year, full of all new trials, grief, joy, pain and triumph.  But I will not walk into to it fearful of what’s to come, or blindly telling myself it won’t.  Instead I am going to walk in to 2017 the way I walked out of 2016, knowing I don’t walk alone.  Grief does not come with out joy; sorrow does not come without happiness.  You can not be brought low without first having been high, and you can not move higher without having been low.  But I know the beautiful promise that I will never walk alone.  There will always be a risen savior that will never leave or forsake me.  You ask me how I know?  Every step of my life is evidence of it.  From the worst of the worst, to the best of the best I have learned how to do ALL things through Him who strengthens me.  I pray as this New Year begins you will remember that we all have a choice when the storms come, because they will come.  As for me, I will do my very best even amidst my humanness to remember that no matter how big the wind and the waves that surround me, I am never in the boat alone.