2012

When I read this prayer, I cried.  It resonated so deeply within my heart. 

That I can recall, I have never had a more difficult year as a whole than 2011.  The year brought some of the deepest hurts I have ever experienced. 

I watched my sister walk through losing her best friend.

I watched as Mary, who had become like family to us, struggled with a very aggressive cancer that showed no mercy. 

I walked alongside two young boys as they struggled through the months immediately following their mom's death.

I watched close friends walk through their most heart-wrenching circumstances in life to date. 

I walked through months and months of unending conflict with another believer, the deepest and most draining conflict I have ever been in with another believer (or with anyone for that matter). 

I moved multiple times, changed jobs a few times, messed up a lot.

All this to say, 2011 was excruciatingly difficult. 

But, I also experienced some of the deepest joys I have ever known as I saw the Lord powerfully make Himself known in the darkest moments of this year. 

I experienced the comfort of the Lord in ways I have never known before.

But, if I were to sum up this year with one word, one lesson, one truth, it would be this:

Grace. 

I understood the grace of the Lord in deeper and more profound ways than I have ever known.  Over and over again this year, I realized how frail I am.  How sinful I am.  How often I let people down.  How impossible it is for me to do any of it on my own.  And I saw His strong, yet kind hand lift me up again and again, reminding me that I don't stand in what I do or don't do; I stand only in what He has already done on my behalf.   

It is finished. 

There is an abundance of grace. And that's good  news for me, because I need it every moment of every day.   

The temptation for me in starting a new year is to think that because of a change in the date on the calendar, I can suddenly be a new person overnight (literally).  I can make lists and lists of all the things I want to change and do better this year, and can hold on to the hope that this year will be easier.

But, if that were the case, then I missed the point of it all.  The last 12 months of tears and frustration and impatience and hurt and grief would all be wasted if I really believed that I can change myself and that a life free of uncomfortable things is somehow better. 

The reality is that though there were plenty of resolutions that I did not keep from the start of 2011 to now, there is one thing that I did grow in: I think I understand the gospel more deeply, simply because I've needed it and clung to it in new ways. 

So....I will make goals and plans for this year and seek to grow and improve.  But, none of that can be done apart from grace.  Because, I am going to fail in many all of those well-intended goals.  I will need his grace in ways this year that will be new and different than the ways in which I needed it last year.  But that grace and the God who extends it are the same this year as they were last year.  And He knows who He wants me to be at the end of 2012 and what it will take to get me to that place.  If it is through more tears and trials and disappointment, I will gladly accept that because I know His grace will be there to meet me.  I know He will be there in those moments.  And He is what I want more than anything else in this world. 

So, I have goals and plans for growth this year.  But, more than a more organized schedule or a neater room, I just want to know Him more.  I want to abide in Him.  I want to be changed by Him.  I want to say, at the end of 2012, that I have been given a more clear picture of the gospel and a deeper understanding of what it means for today, right now.