Happy Belated New Year!

Happy belated New Year!   Hope you had a safe and memorable start of the year.

We celebrated New Years up in Lake Arrowhead with our friends.  A first for our family.  We’ve never been able to make it to midnight, much less ring in the new year in another city.  When our friends invited us up to their cabin, I immediately said “yes.”  So unlike me.  On big holiday weekends, Ed and I love to avoid the traffic and stay home.  But I am a new Mom.  Ready to embark on a new year.  


So despite my fear of icy roads and injury, I thought it was time for our kids to see snow.  Sad, isn’t it?  Our kids have never touched the stuff, much less stepped foot in it.  And last weekend they did just that.  With snowboards -- and they loved it.  I wish I could tell you that I joined them, but I didn’t.  Bad back and a case of chicken-itis.  But I did make it to the mountain two days in a row to watch them and take pictures.  The old me would have stayed in the cabin beside a cozy fire with a magazine.  But I couldn’t miss out on the opportunity of watching them embark on something new.  And it was great.

So is this week just another week for you?  Or do you really take it to heart that a new year is enfolding right before you?  Was last year so great that you hope to repeat it?  Or is there room for improvement?  Do you want to stretch a little, grow a little, crawl out of your comfort zone a little?

I do.

All I know is that this year, I don’t want to resemble a silk plant.  You know the kind --  collects dust and just sits there.  It never grows, it never looks any different.  It just is.  

I hate that.  I was that.  I was a gloriously huge silk plant.

I think I have my sights set on becoming a paper white.  You know those beautiful, tall white flowers.  You see them a lot this time of year. 

Paper whites (also known as narcissus) are these ugly looking bulbs with white roots dangling beneath them.  They’re not much to look at.   But given a little water and a little sunshine, these ugly bulbs slowly turn into these little bursts of sweet white flowers.  

I planted a few this year and placed them on our kitchen table.  Each day, we’d watch to see if a new shoot would grow.  The morning we returned home from Lake Arrowhead, we were greeted by a paper white in full bloom.   It had finally come into it’s own.

  

That’s what I hope to do with this second chapter of my life.  Come into my own more and more.   Grow into the person that God wants me to be.  Not continue to be the person that I was.  Yuck.  God has better plans than that.  For me.  And for you.

Chelsea Cameron, who teaches my 24/7 Family class, shared this with us one day.

“I’m not what I should be.  I’m not what I could be.  But I’m not where I was.”  

Brilliant, isn’t it?  


Not a ton of pressure to get it right the first time.  Just baby steps taken in the right direction.

The days of being a silk plant are in my past.   I look forward to God planting His bulbs (you and me!) where He knows we’ll bloom.   If it were up to me, I’d plant myself in the shade during a drought.  But God knows right where to place us.  If we only listen and obey.

And if we do, what a new year we’ll have.

Here's to blooming where you're planted!