A Pre-New Year's Ramble

I'm really glad that it's one of my favorite times of the year. Today I just finished putting lights up on my house and my thighs are very, very sore from climbing on the roof. My goal is to make the Christmas season as "Christmas-y" as possible. I'm trying to go the extra mile this year by putting up lights, getting people gifts, and trying as hard as I can to be kind and cheerful to people.

But to be honest, what I have been waiting a really long time for is not Christmas. I love Christmas and I'm going to enjoy every minute of the season for the next few weeks, but for at least 2 months now I've been thinking about New Year's.

I like the end of the year because it is a good time for a person to reflect on the year, what they did and didn't do, what they were or were not able to accomplish. I really like songs about new year's such as Death Cab's "New Year" and Five Iron Frenzy's "New Year's Eve" because they are reflective. My favorite episode of the old Nickelodeon show "Pete and Pete" was the episode about new year's. It's good for me because I have this habit of getting way too caught up in the moment. While that's good in some ways, it has been bad for me because I tend to lose sight of long-term goals and directions. I'm that guy who puts the short-term goal of taking a nap over the long-term goal of studying to get an A on a test. New Year's is a chance for me to step back and try to remember what kind of person I'm trying to be and where I'm trying to go with my life.

Last year my only new year's resolution was to not be a douche bag. Did I achieve that goal? You tell me. I think that has always been kind of an unsaid goal of mine - don't be a douche bag. Sometimes I can be. I try not to. It's very hard.

This year instead of having one resolution that is basically a given at any time in my life, I have come up with a laundry list of things I would like to do better. And that list goes from things like "play music more and videogames less" to "be more optimistic" to "stop sleeping so much." I really am going to have a lot to live up to in 2009. Changing is so hard sometimes.

But there is one specific thing that I am really going to have to key in on next year. One of my biggest struggles and hardest things for me to do in life is to care about anybody other than myself. If there is one thing I really hate about me, it's that. I can be so selfish and self-centered sometimes, completely unaware of the people around me without even realizing it. I'm sure I've hurt a lot of people at one time or another by acting like this, and just know that I hate it.

But I'm going to try to do better. This past year I put a lot of emphasis on trying to learn and understand life a little better, and if I've learned anything it's that I truly don't understand anything. The mistake I think that I made is one that I think a lot of people, and a lot of Christians, make at times. It's like I tried so hard to be right that I forgot that I'm supposed to be good. I don't think Jesus came to earth and died so that he could make us all right. I think he died so we could know him, and that along the way he taught us how to be good people.

I'm going to still try to learn and do well, but more than that I'm going to try to do good. I may misunderstand God, life, culture, politics, and religion sometimes, but hopefully I will learn how to be kind to my neighbor. Maybe I can learn how to forgive my enemies, give to the poor, and take up my cross. Maybe I can learn how to lose my life instead of spending every single day trying to find it.