Riflessione

At the end of every year, I like to take time to reflect on the experiences, lessons, and opportunities that arose during the course of the last 365 days. My thoughts on 2008:

* God always takes care of me. I could never even remotely understand why God takes such good care of me, in spite of my transgressions and mess ups. But I am grateful that He does. This year He has certainly had His hand over my life, and I pray that He will continue to take care of me, even though I usually do everything possible to not take care of myself. God is good and He answers prayer.

* No matter how badly you might want to make something work, sometimes things just aren’t meant to be. It usually starts with a quiet whisper, warning you to proceed with caution, and ends up a giant slap in the face that reveals what you’ve known, deep down, all along. All the “want to” in the world can’t make something right when it’s wrong.

* I’ve got to do a better job of listening to that quiet whisper. Intuition is powerful, and I need to trust myself more than I have in the past.

* I need to take better care of my body. It’s the only one I’ve got, and it’s beginning to rebel against my obsessions with Little Caesar’s Hot N Ready pizzas in visually obvious ways. I want to try to cook more this year, too. Hopefully it will save me some money and some extra lbs.

* Life is crazy, but it is, at its heart, good. One of the last lines of “Desiderata” by Max Ehrman sums it up: “With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world.” I’m going to try to see the good in the everyday. I’m going to try to see the good in people.

And finally, 2008 wouldn’t be complete without one last quote...

“Ring out the old, ring in the new. Ring, happy bells, across the snow. The year is going, let him go. Ring out the false, ring in the new.” Alfred Tennyson