At the beginning of every year I make a lengthy list of resolutions for the new year and share them for my accountability and your entertainment. Some of these are purely personal, some are church-related, and a few are just for funsies. But as of January 1, 2025, I intend to keep them all.
Of course, we'll see how I feel by January 3. Here's the list:
1. Read some poetry every day
You know what's really good at forcing you to slow down? Poetry. Coincidentally, you know what I've read very little of since high school? Poetry.
There's no quantitative goal here—I'm not trying to knock out 10 poetry books or anything like that. Some days I may read one sonnet and then shut the book, other days I may spend half an hour immersed in some poet's collected works. Regardless, I want to devote at least a few minutes every day to the kind of literary beauty that only poetry offers.
2. Memorize Scripture
Recycling this resolution from 2020, because I think most of the 368 verses I memorized that year have fallen out of my brain by now. Scripture memorization is just not something that comes naturally to me, and it's an area where I wish I had more confidence.
I don't have a specific number in mind for this one, I'll just make flash cards in conjunction with my daily devotional time. And I want to be sure I keep those flash cards so I don't have to recreate them again in 2028 when this resolution inevitably makes its next reoccurence.
3. Read Ulysses and Finnegans Wake
I don't get James Joyce, I just don't. I've read Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Ulysses, and after each book I walked away somewhere between underwhelmed and annoyed. I find him pretentious and snobbish, and think half the literati who praise his name are just doing so to fit in with the crowd.
But here's my dirty little secret: I want to see what they're seeing. I don't understand James Joyce, but I wish I did.
So, inspired by our trip to Dublin last year, I'm making this the Year of Joyce. I've accumulated a stack of study guides to aid me in comprehension and I'm going to tackle not only Ulysses, his masterpiece, but also Finnegans Wake, notoriously regarded as the most difficult work of literature ever written. By the end of the year I will know for sure whether Joyce really is the genius everyone says he is or whether I can abandon trying to understand him once and for all.
4. Organize music library
Because I am hopelessly old-fashioned in this department, I still maintain an iTunes library of purchased, downloaded music despite also having an Apple Music subscription so I can stream like the rest of the world does. There are currently 10,019 songs in that library, taking up 63.29 GB of memory on my computer, and some of the songs haven't been listened to in literally 20 years.
So, a few minutes a day, I want to do two things: 1) cull through the music I don't care about owning—mostly free demos and giveaway albums, and 2) burn the albums I do care about to CDs so I have a hard copy somewhere when my computer inevitably crashes. I know, I know, the cloud, blah blah blah. You heard the part about me being hopelessly old-fashioned, right?
The fun part of this project: rediscovering music I haven't thought about in ages. The maddening part: using iTunes. Apple really has abandoned it, and it shows. But I press on, raging against the dying of the light.
5. Listen to Bob Dylan's complete discography
Speaking of music, have you heard of this Bob Dylan fella that Timothée Chalamet is playing in A Complete Unknown? I hear good things, but I confess that my exposure is almost exclusively limited to the hits (which did not stop me from opening my wallet back in the days when all my spending money went toward buying music—I own 16 Dylan albums.)
So in 2025, with Bob Dylan: All the Songs as my guidebook, I'm going to work my way through Mr. Zimmerman's discography, all 40 studio albums. For the sticklers out there, that's the finish line: studio albums. If I get to The Bootleg Series, the 21 live albums, and his work with the Band and the Traveling Wilburys, then cool. But I've got to draw the line somewhere.
So if my voice suddenly starts sounding really nasally this year, you'll know why.
6. Write a Lenten devotional book
In 2022, I wrote and self-published a devotional book for Advent. It was well-received by my congregation and friends, and I still get a thank you or two every December from folks reading (or rereading) it as part of their daily time with the Lord. It was a lot of work, but it was a fun process, and I'm proud of the end result.
So this spring I want to do something similar for Lent, giving folks something to guide their devotional time in the season leading up to Easter. You'll know by March 5 (Ash Wednesday) whether I've pulled this one off!
7. Lead a strategic planning process for SGBC
Like many churches, mine has declined over the last 5 years by virtually every statistical measure. That doesn't mean the sky is falling, but it does mean we can't just keep doing what we're doing and expect things to get better. Not only is vision needed, but so is strategy.
So in the last quarter of 2024, our deacon chair and I assembled a committee of church members to serve as a strategic planning team, with a mission of crafting a written report of proposals the church needs to take to better live out our vision. That group has already had its first meeting, and will continue to meet roughly once per month until the fall.
So this resolution, the most important on this list, is to lead that committee to write a report that is comprehensive but succinct, imaginative but realistic, and persuasive enough to be adopted by the congregation. It's a big job, but a needed one, and I'm excited by the possibilities.
8. Get healthy
You know the drill: Run every day. Cut my sugar intake. Drink more water. And, most importantly, watch what I'm eating.
Some variation of "get healthy" is the most popular New Year's resolution every year. At age 35, it's time for me to get on board. I don't anticipate this one being easy, but I'm weirdly motivated about it in a way I never have been before. We'll see.
9. Finish my sermons on Friday
Every Saturday night after the kids go to bed, I go to the church to review my sermon for Sunday morning. The idea is for that to be a time for practicing the sermon out loud and cutting any fat before I preach it to the congregation the next morning.
Unfortunately, there have been way too many Saturdays over the last few years where I'm still writing new material at 11:00 pm, less than 12 hours before I'm supposed to stand and deliver. Not ideal.
So the resolution for 2025 is to routinely have my rough draft finished by the time I head home on Friday afternoon. I'll allow myself grace on super busy weeks, but I need to be doing a lot more editing and practicing than writing on Saturdays.
10. Walk to work
I live two blocks from the church. Why am I wasting gas every day when I could be getting some fresh air instead? Time to stretch my legs and pound the pavement instead of lazily "commuting" 45 seconds down the road.
11. Spend less money
I don't need more books. I don't need more baseball caps. And if I'm going to honor resolution #8, I don't need more fast food either.
So, starting with a family-wide No-Spend January, I'm trying to cut back on the retail therapy. I'm far from a spendthrift, but I can be more frugal than I have been to this point. And with three kids to put through college in a few years, every penny counts.
12. Track my time
At various points in adulthood, starting in college, I have kept a detailed, handwritten log of how I spend my time in half-hour increments. At best, it's a great tool for memory, record keeping, and accountability, and it discourages me from wasting time—after all, it's pretty sobering to write "doomscrolled" down for a 2-hour block of time. At worst, it feels anal-retentive and crazy.
Well, I haven't been doing it for more than a year, and I think I could use a little crazy to break some bad habits (see resolution #9). So in 2025, at least when I'm working, I'm going to get back to tracking my time.
