January 6, 2020 – Quietly Passing By

Est. Reading Time: 3 minutes

Hello to all who have decided to follow along as I post for 21 days straight as part of our church fast. As you can see, each entry is numbered as a particular day, so if you are reading this and the title above doesn’t say Day 1, then you should stop now and go read from Day 1. Thanks for being brave enough to join me.

Welcome to Day 2 of 21 days of posts corresponding to the 21-day fast being observed at our church. Today, I am going to go into more detail about something I mentioned on Day 1 – my 2020 To-Do list.

I gave up on New Year’s resolutions about two decades ago and in the last few years I’ve turned to creating a To-Do list for the year. I admitted on Day 1 that my frustration was that my list never seemed to change much from year to year. In the interest of full transparency, here is my list for 2020. You may chuckle, laugh, and snicker as much as you like, I can’t hear it.

Finish writing a book
Sing more – at the college and at church
Read more (a book a month)
Take more vacation days (and use them effectively)
Continue having daily devotions
Pray even more
Continue to teach my son to drive
Go to even more parties and events
Tell my wife I love her every day
Talk with my mom more (at least once a week)
Regularly communicate with my daughter
Try something new every month
Walk on the beach more (requires vacation – see #4)
Post more blog entries (at least two a month)
Build stuff
Show love more
Lose more weight (~205 would be nice)
Walk/exercise more
Continue to fix the house
Chase the lion…

You see that some are interdependent (#4 and #13, for example), and others are redundant (#1 and #20, as explained on Day 1). Some have been there for four or more years, but there are a couple of new ones.

Item #15 is new. I want to build stuff. Woodworking, crafting, and “making” are all on my radar for this year and I hope to build both useful (having a definite purpose) and useless (having a more subjective purpose) things. I never used to want to create things, at least not since I quit building with Lego pieces. Now I want to make things to help and things to appreciate.

Item #16 is a variant of a previous year’s item. Saying this phrase out loud feels odd, like the words are supposed to be in that order, but that is the order I need them in. I don’t have a problem loving people, but I do have a problem with showing that love, so #16 is huge this year. I’ll explain in a later post, or posts, why #16 is so hard for me and maybe it will sound and feel familiar to you. If so, let me know and we can encourage each other to show love more.

Item #19 is new also, a direct result of buying a house and finding all of the things that need fixed. We knew when we bought it that there would be a long list of updates and repairs, but we’ve been surprised at least three times now. I’m kind of done with surprises with the house…I want to fix what I know is wrong/broken/messed up before discovering anything else.

All I know is that if I can do half of the things on this list, I believe I will feel like I accomplished something come January 2021, and maybe I can add some new items to the list. If I accomplish them all, then I believe I will feel as if I caught that lion…

Before I completely sign off for today, here is a fairly solid, numbered list of topics for each day. This way you can pick and choose which posts you want to read. Just imagine that each numbered entry says “day” in front of it.

Photo credit – Photo by Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash

Day: January 6, 2020

21 Days of Posts – Day 2 – New Year’s To-Do List