Looking Back And Looking Forward

It can be a disappointing thing to begin a new year.  For me the promise of a new start is idealized while the living it out is not much different from the year before in most ways.  This past year was a bit of a lost one for me.  Not that it wasn't worthwhile, but I have been a bit directionless, dabbling a bit here, trying a bit there.  I tend to be a Jill of all trades and master of none anyway, but even more so this past year.

I'm trying to do better this time around.  A few weeks ago I sat down and wrote out both my activities and my goals.  I use the word goals very loosely.  Except for my daughters' educations, there are no firm plans to get from point A to point B.

What I have been participating in this past year is:

Teaching my daughters
Participated in a small homeschool coop
Daily household upkeep
Learning Koine Greek
Teaching a class on the Liturgy
Participated in an Thomas Aquinas study group
Blogging
Church choir member
Chairman of the Adult Education team at church
Substitute teach for the Adult Sunday School
Lector
Communion bread baker
Communion assistant

This list looks and sounds more impressive than it is.  Many of these things are sporadic and don't really take up much time, but others are pretty time consuming.

My goal and/or hopes are:

Prepare daughters for college (This is the one that is a goal.)
Prepare myself for seminary  (This is more of a hope.)
Grow deeper in my understanding of God's word.
Develop artistic abilities.

In planning, this next year looks similar, the exceptions being, I'll now be teaching a class on the Gospel of Luke instead of the Liturgy and I have resigned from the choir.  The study of the Gospel of Luke has already been a real blessing and I hope to draw closer to Christ as I work through this.  Deciding to leave the choir surprised me in a way, but the more I thought about it, the more it made sense.

There are some things that happened this year that were outside of the norm.  I continued to heal both physically and emotionally after losing our baby.  David fell from a ladder, breaking four ribs, a vertebrae and puncturing a lung.  Some friendships grew more distant and others grew closer.  My father suffered his fourth stroke.  This seems to be the stuff of life, but the past year packed in a bit more stuff than I'd have preferred.   Through it all though, I've found that while some people can be incredibly callous, most are kind, and some extraordinarily so, it makes a world of difference to have a good doctor who also has a nice personality and that even when it feels as though God is A.W.AO.L., he is there, walking alongside.