December Daily: The New Year

-
Have you given any thought to the new year? If you're like me most of the time, you're just making it through this week! Next year?!!

For several years, when Wes was on staff of our church in Texas, our pastor encouraged us to plan for the new year. Wes has carried that through here, and has been working on a church calendar for a couple of months now. And since we have a few weeks left before the new year, I want to sit down and make some plans for my personal life; not so much resolutions as goals for the coming year. Our pastor used to say, "If you aim at nothing, you're bound to hit it!"

What are some areas that we homemakers should set goals in?
  • Spiritual - we are individually responsible to God for our own relationship with him! We should have goals for Bible-reading, Scripture memory, prayer, giving, and witnessing
  • Physical - we're also responsible for taking care of ourselves. Not excessive pampering, but truly caring for our health with good food in proper portions, adequate rest, some exercise each day, some quiet time for ourselves, checkups. And then plan for some shopping for clothes (even the thrift store counts as shopping!), hair appointments - things to keep us looking nice.
  • Marriage - our relationships with our husbands are the longest-lasting ones we have. Our children will grow up and make their own lives; will we still know our husbands when that day comes? We should make some goals for dates (even if it's just once a month), for building that relationship with loving words, maybe even plan some more intimate times with our mates (they won't complain!)
  • Children - we should spend time with them, maybe one-on-one? Maybe plan a Bible study, memorize some Scripture with them, schedule family nights.
  • Homemaking - have a plan, no matter how loose, for getting household tasks accomplished. I like FlyLady's Zone method; others may clean one room or area each day. Plan for heavy cleaning, emergencies, busy times outside the home
  • Creativity - set goals for creative projects, if you have interests in that area. Learn something new. Make gifts. Make things to sell. Make things to decorate your home or to wear.
Planning ahead also does several things for you:
  • Reduces stress - the more thoughts you can get on paper, the less you have to remember!
  • Saves time - you don't have to stop to plan when it's time to get things done
  • Motivates - planning ahead gets you excited about all the things coming up
  • Makes you more efficient - goals give you a map to follow, helping you get more done, more efficiently
  • Prepares you for the unexpected - planning your work helps you when emergencies arise - you know where you stand what needs to be done, without having to stress out over the little things
  • Prepares you for the busy times - those inevitable busy seasons won't creep up on you when you know they're coming and have planned for them - birthdays, church meetings, school events, holidays
(These points were loosely based upon Thoughts on Planning a New Year by Dr. Cary Schmidt)

Do you make goals for the new year? Care to share what some of them are? At the end of the year, I'll share what I have in these areas. We can be an encouragement to each other!

Comments

  1. Liesa9:13 AM

    WHAT AN INSPIRATION!

    PRAY THAT I WILL "JUST" DO IT!!!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Susan11:00 AM

    Hope these ideas were a help! I wrote them out for my own benefit, because I need to plan too!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Tori Leslie12:16 PM

    What a great post Susan, Man I need this one. I have been making it by the skin of my teeth lately and still not getting everything done. I'm gonna have to revisit Flylady and try to make a plan. You know what Bro. Todd Lasseter, our associate at Trinity says: It you fail to plan, you plan to fail.

    Thanks for the motiation!

    ReplyDelete
  4. Anonymous12:50 PM

    Great ideas! Would you mind if I used this in our ladies' ministry newsletter? Citing you as author. of course. :-)

    ReplyDelete
  5. Susan1:40 PM

    I'm glad it was helpful to you, Tori! My intention was to be a help, but I was afraid it would come across too preachy.

    Barbara, you are welcome to use it for your newsletter. Glad it was a help!

    ReplyDelete
  6. Lynn10:27 AM

    I came here from Barbara H.'s blog. I love the quote, "If you aim at nothing, you're bound to hit it." I'd better do some more thinking about where I want to aim this year :)

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Thanks for taking a minute to read my ramblings and leave a comment! I appreciate it!

Popular posts from this blog

A Week of Modest Dress

-
Image
The rest of this series can be found at these links: Friday , Saturday , Sunday , Monday , Tuesday , Wednesday . Some ladies around the Blogosphere have been posting pictures of themselves going about their everyday routine in dresses. Many of us ladies wear dresses and skirts all the time, and others have asked how we play with our children, do our housework, exercise, in dresses. Candy decided to show some ladies doing just that on her blog, and asked for ladies to post pics on their blogs too. This kind of thing appeals to me, so I had to get in on the action on this one. I'll post pics each day for a week (if I can keep my son Andrew taking pictures!), and you'll see a little bit of our life as a pastor's family, as well as see how another lady and her daughter (though not so many pics of her - she's camera shy!) live out their conviction of modest dress in their everyday lives. Here I am this morning, as Samuel and I left the house for our walk. I alterna...
Read more

Who - or What - Is Your God?

-
I've read lots of opinions on lots of things during my years online. Wes was a programmer in the US Air Force from 1990 till 1996, and naturally, as e-mail and the internet came into more common use, our family was on the front edge of technology. I remember searching the web for Christian women's sites, and finding very little. After a while, more and more Christian sites began showing up, and I began reading and joining forums. It came to the point that I was reading about lifestyles varying somewhat from my rather mainstream independent Baptist upbringing. Some of it made sense to me, other things were a little far out there for me. None of it was wrong, though, and everyone had Scripture to back up what they believed. The latest thing to hit the internet is the blog. Everybody has one, at least everyone who knows what a blog is! And that includes me, of course. I love blogging. Anyway . . . we all read each other's blogs and it's almost like a parallel soc...
Read more

How Do You Respond?

-
This might get a little preachy, but it's something that hit me square in the face yesterday and I thought it would be a good thing to share. To set the stage: Yesterday morning, Wes and I were getting ready to take the kids shopping down in Bellingham, WA. The Lord has blessed us with an extra bit this month, and the kids and Wes needed some things, so after Andrew and Beth were finished with school, we were planning to head out. I needed to know what Wes wanted to do about lunch and supper, since we'd be leaving right around lunch time and we weren't sure when we'd get back home. I asked him if he wanted me to fix our main meal of the day before we left (which we've been doing recently), and he said no; we'd take some snacks with us. So I was planning what I'd do before we left so supper would be quicker when we got home. He casually said, "I thought we might stop at Red Robin (a restaurant) on the way home," to which I immediately respond...
Read more