One-Stop-Resolution Shopping (which includes eating the damn cake)
It’s 12:10 afternoon on January 1, and I just did a Twitter search for #NewYearsResolutions.
Turns out the hashtag is, no real surprise here, trending.
Turns out also that under it, #motivation, #diet, #workout, #healthyeating, #stopcaringwhatothersthink, #noexcuses, and #change are top tags.
So’s #hangover, actually, which may or may not be related to this blog, I suppose…
Anayway, as I look at all those annual-been-there-done-that-maybe-this-year-it-will-stick New Year’s goals, it dawned on me that perhaps instead, an overarching resolution for 2018 might be at hand.
At the risk of sounding far more pious than I tend to be, it seems like the First Commandment might just serve as a fine one-stop-shopping #NewYearsResolution: “You shall have no other gods but me.”
That’s the thing, really, that messes us up: when we trust in something or someone more than we trust in God, and the intentions that God has for us.
So many pressures claim our attention and allegiance: the pressure to be thin, to be beautiful, to Have It All Together.
We might find ourselves in toxic relationships, addicted to someone or some substance, even addicted to a perception of ourselves that might be outdated or out-of-line.
Maybe we sabotage ourselves by staying in patterns that defeat rather than uplift us, that make us squander rather than savor our gifts.
Perhaps we don’t trust our possibilities, and opt for the security of Safe Ruts rather than the risk of Unknown Adventure.
It’s possible that we don’t even recognize our other allegiances as such, and find ourselves relinquishing or betraying our religious claims because we don’t see them for what they are: challenges and contradictions to our theology and the faith that springs up from it.
So a handy dandy pocket 2018 resolution is: Worship God.
That’s it.
Worship God.
Not gods.
But God.
Worship the One who has claimed you as you are, while also calling you into new ways of being.
Worship the One who has an agenda of resurrection, bringing life out of things that have died, or should die, into spectactular new creation.
Worship the One who wants you to be healthy and well, which may mean that you eat the damn cake.
Worship the One who judges, not out of cruelty but out of concern, willing you to be whole, and to create wholeness, rather than be broken, and create brokenness.
Worship the One who sees that your poverty of wallet or spirit is in need of redemption.
Worship the One who knows that you can’t redeem yourself, and provides advocates and community to help you find your ground again.
Worshp the One who sees that the oppression you experience or that you cause is in need of redemption.
Worship the One who knows that you can’t redeem yourself, and provides advocates and community to help you find your worth—or that of others’—again.
Worship the One who sees that your external or internal malignment is in need of redemption.
Worship the One who sees that your privilege is in need of redemption.
Worship the One who empowers you to resist anything less than your fullness of being…which is intricately related to everyone’s fullness of being.
Worship the One who was on the move.
Worship the One who needed a nap.
Worship the One who got angry at unrighteousness.
Worship the One who loved good wine and good food.
Worship the One who Called a Thing What It Is.
Worship the One who was born by a woman.
Worship the One who was schooled by a woman.
Worship the One who was proclaimed first by women.
Worship the One who injects the impossible into the impossible: something radically risen out of something unbearably dead.
In 2018, then, resolve, to Worship God.
That’s it.
One resolution.
Worship God: not brokenness, not despair, not dysfunction, not meanness, not oppression, not hate, not apathy, not security, not racism, not power, not slogged-through-fatigue, not unreal expectations, not lack-of-self, not death, not that-which-should-be-dead.
Instead, worship God, who loves you, loves creation, loves re-creating, loves reconciliation, loves restoration, loves resurrection.
And cake.
God loves cake, so absolutely resolve to eat the cake.