We run our website the way we wished the whole internet worked: we provide high quality original content with no ads. We are funded solely by your direct support. Please consider supporting this project.

A Christ-Follower’s Alternative to New Year’s Goals

掌に梅 plum blossoms on my hand

tomo tang via Compfight

Richard Dahlstrom over at Fibonacci Faith offered an alternative to setting New Year’s goals that can steal peace in our lives. What if we committed to attending to all the little revelations God gives us and made space to absorb these God-moments in order to respond well? Let’s all make this a year where we open ourselves to what God is doing. Who knows what God will do with this kind of openness and willingness to respond?

From the article:

I’m close to throwing all these in the trash though, because I keep adding more and more goals to my life, and the end result is an erosion of peace, especially the kind of peace that is promised by Christ here.  I’m beginning to wonder if all this goal setting isn’t just another carnival, tailor made for type Americans to distract us from things that really matter.  It’s appropriate, of course, to pursue health, and to hone one’s craft, be it writing, music, art, programming, or whatever.  But I’m convinced that the somewhat random objectifying of every pursuit, setting a bar and going after it, is mostly a big distraction.  The truth is that I can meet all those goals and still find myself on the summit of accomplishments, only to realize that I’ve climbed the wrong mountain. To put it another way – I can reach all my goals, and still be far from the life God has in mind for me.

Category:
Tags: , ,

Related Reading

Pretty Little Vampires: Osheta Moore

We’re thrilled today to introduce you to Osheta Moore, blogger extraordinaire over at Shalom in the City. Osheta is in the middle of a wonderful series of blog posts on finding her “tribe”. We love this woman. Listen to a section from her “about me”: I’m an African-American, suburbanite Texan from the Bible Belt living in…

Did Jesus Instruct Us to Arm Ourselves?

Over the past few posts, I’ve been dealing with the passages that are frequently used to argue how Jesus condoned violence. One of these takes place just after the last supper and just before Jesus and his disciples were going to travel to the Mount of Olives to pray. To prepare his disciples, Jesus tells them;…

Swords into Plowshares

Eneas De Troya via Compfight Kelley Nikondeha over at SheLoves wrote a penetrating essay on the work of peace and the prophet’s dreams of replacing the work of war into the work of feeding people. Peace isn’t passive. It’s hard work. From Kelley’s essay: Beating swords into plowshares is hard work–hammering, melting, reworking and shaping new…

Sermon: Diaper Power

In this short clip from Greg Boyd’s Sermon Diaper Power, he introduces the theme of the sermon where talks about how the poverty of the manger exemplified the power of God. In this sermon, Greg shows that God really is like the baby swaddled in clothes in the manger. The kind of power that God…

The Violent “Church Triumphant”

In light of how central enemy-loving non-violence is to Jesus’ teaching and to his cross-centered revelation of God, we have to wonder why the church has refused to listen to its head and instead condoned violence, as pointed out in the previous post? Christian theologians have used OT’s violent portraits of God, at least since…

Jesus Refuted Old Testament Laws

Although it’s clear that Jesus regarded the Old Testament as the inspired word of God, he also directly challenged aspects of the Old Testament law. To illustrate, Jesus was repudiating Sabbath law when he defended his disciples’ harvesting of food on the Sabbath (Mt 12:1-14; cf. Ex. 34:21). Some scholars argue that the disciples were…