"Resolve" Insurance

On January 1, 2011 I wrote the following in my personal journal: “Today is New Year’s Day. As ‘days’ are measured, this is considered to be a very important day. Somehow we are made to believe that what we do with this “DAY” can influence the 364 days of this ‘New Year’ that follow…The older I get, the more I seem to focus on how differently things happen than what I hope or plan for. It seems that THE ONLY CERTAINTY IN LOOKING TO A NEW YEAR ARE ALL THE UNCERTAINTIES THAT AWAIT US!!...The best preparation we can make is somehow to insure ourselves against these unexpected stimuli that will obviously come. While we can’t insulate ourselves from the reality of painful situations (nor can we deny them), we can prepare ourselves with certain ‘Navigational Skills’ to help us continue towards our destination (or resolutions, goals, etc.)”

I am a firm believer in the importance of setting personal goals. Goals should be realistic, challenging, well thought out, and consider both long-term and short-term ambitions. Having clearly stated goals are the basis of any accomplishment we might achieve in our lives. As we take the time to think through these “Goals” (or “Resolutions”), there should be a dual sense of things we would like to do or experience as well as making a positive difference in the part of the world where we live.

On the first Sunday of this New Year I asked the small group of Christ-Followers where I teach each week to share some of their resolutions with me. Surprisingly, no one made any indication that they even bothered to make any resolutions. While a couple of people finally admitted that they were striving to make some positive change, the consensus of the majority was that they no longer strive to make any “Resolutions” because they never keep them! This is a very serious situation when looking at it psychologically. We will leave that for the professionals. What this little exercise did for me was to make me sit down and think about some simple, practical ways to help us “regular folks” stick to our goals or resolutions. The following posts in the next several days represents my ideas for “Insuring” our Resolve – to Make it happen! I hope you have some kind of "methodology" for sticking to your goals. I would love to hear about them.