Elephant on the Menu

Happy New Year to you and yours!  I am excited to welcome the new year and new opportunities.  The year 2012 was not the best around here.  Oh, there were moments of joy, but it seemed there were more difficult and even heart-breaking times.

The year ended with us trying to offer comfort to dear friends who are facing a parent's nightmare.  Their daughter's boyfriend (and the father of their grandchildren) is dead....shot twice in the head in a robbery gone wrong.  Drugs were an issue.  Their daughter now sits in jail along with two others, charged with robbery, conspiracy, and homicide.  Two babies have, for all intents and purposes, lost both their parents.  There is nothing we can say or do to offer comfort.  The only hope lies in the God of comfort and peace...the peace he offers is beyond our understanding.  I pray and trust he will bring something good out of even this.

Moving on to better things.....

I promised to reveal my One Word for 2013 and here, without further ado, is my word:

The One Word is supposed to describe how you want to live or who you want to be.  It's a word, one word, that you can focus on each day.

When I began to think about what my word would be a few jumped to mind right away.  Then I narrowed the field to two.  I couldn't seem to decide which one was the right one.  So I prayed for an answer.  I looked back at my blog searching for clues.  I kept my mind open to confirmation.  It seemed that "intentional" was the word that most often came to mind.  I've often had the feeling in the past few years that life was living me, rather than I was living it.  Not the most pleasant feeling.  Then I started reading a book on simplifying life.  The introduction alone has shaken my world.  The authors explain that to change things we have to have a plan, but then there has to be motion to move the plan forward.  

We (I) make great plans, but they never happen or we start but fizzle out.  Why?  Because we are daunted by the big picture.  We don't know how to make it all happen.  What we need to do, instead, is think about what step we need to take each day and then take that one step.  The authors offered this nugget of thinking and I'm clinging to it.

Like eating an elephant, goals can't be reached in an instant.  We have to be intentional.  We have to take the first bite, chew it, swallow it.  Then we can take the second bite.  It will take a while, but eventually the goal is reached because it's a lot easier for our minds to deal with just one step at a time.  We don't feel overwhelmed and give up.  We can celebrate the success of each step.

So, INTENTIONAL, that's my one word for the year.  I'm going to eat the elephant this year....one bite at a time.