2018: A Personal Reflection

I feel a great deal of angst staring at a blank page. I have been at this since this morning, frantic and uneasy on how to write about my year 2018. It’s now three in the afternoon; ah, what to say?

It was a good year. It was a hard year.

2018 began with a dash of sweetness for us spending most of our first month with my parents-in-law. My husband and I enjoyed every bit of their presence, thankful for the time to be with family we don’t often get the chance to be with. But it also began with bitterness as we received the sad news of not being pregnant again. I couldn’t explain it, but it felt like we lost a child we never had. It broke our hearts.

I consider myself a reflective person. I contemplate about God, life, and self regularly. But 2018 seems like the first year I had felt wholly present for every moment that transpired and was brutally honest about my thoughts and feelings with myself and others. It was the year that I sensed being unreservedly immersed in the life I was in, without ever drawing back to shield myself from the fullness of joy or pain. I felt every ebb and flow—the bumps, the bruises, the praises—of each moment like never before.

I am not sure what changed in me. Maybe age brings with it a level of depth in the being that didn’t exist before. Maybe it was a result of being hospitalized twice in one year. Maybe it was simply a choice my heart made without my consent. Whatever brought on this experience, 2018 was surely a year of growing and learning for me. This is my attempt at chronicling some of what I have learned.

Choose to be grateful and to grow in gratitude. Gratitude appears to be an obvious lesson I should have learned a long time ago, but I often overlook being thankful. I allow myself, more often than I want to admit, to wallow in what irritates me than the good that I am surrounded with. I constantly rehash what ought to be the way I think it ought to be instead of seeing the beauty of the moment, of how countless events unfolded in a spectacular arrangement outside of how I intended them to be.

It was the year that I sensed being unreservedly immersed in the life I was in, without ever drawing back to shield myself from the fullness of joy or pain. I felt every ebb and flow—the bumps, the bruises, the praises—of each moment like never before..

Ah, I suppose learning to be grateful will be a daily lesson for me. One that I will continue to learn and relearn until it is time for me to leave this world. 2018, though, taught me to be more aware of it. It pointed me to constant gratitude and gave me a chance to grow in it.

Life is tough and chaotic and frustrating, but life is also so sacred and so beautiful. Each day I have breath holds a remarkable piece of God’s love and majesty that I can be thankful for—praise God for. I simply need to notice.

Choose to not be selfish. I have made many choices out of selfishness. Some not too obvious to me, some quite so; I chose it anyway. I seem to get away with it most of the time, and I thought it okay.

Then I made a conscious, selfish choice one day this year. It catapulted into a huge mess of anger and disappointment and disagreement with several people getting hurt in the process. I even started losing hair over being so stressed out about it. So much for selfishness being okay.

It was a hard pill to swallow, but I realized the part I played in it. I knew then I have to be more intentional in choosing to not be selfish even when I can be or because I think I deserve this moment of selfishness. This one will be difficult and will require much effort and denying of the flesh. Selfishness comes naturally to me. It’s my go-to response in most circumstances. It will be quite painful to uproot it out of my heart. But I have to, and I will.

Choose to love even when I am not loved back. Just today I was thinking of how battered and abused I feel. I have enough reason to say quits on loving people. This year has been a particularly hard one for me. I had felt betrayed and overlooked. I feel like I poured myself out to emptiness without being loved in return.

But just today I read a book on leading as a work of love without going numb. To keep my heart open even at my lowest point. I realized this was how Jesus lived—betrayed many times over and yet has chosen to love anyway to the point of death. I have to say, this is scary. The easy choice would be to preserve myself, wall myself in against deep pain. Only, this means, I also never get to know the deep joys of love in God.

I ask, then, for the Holy Spirit’s strength to teach me to love in the way Jesus did. To keep my heart open and feel the full range of the gift of human emotions. To not ever pull-back or grow callous and cynical with people, but to love hard as He did. And to love even harder especially when I am not loved back or acknowledged for that love.

Life is tough and chaotic and frustrating, but life is also so sacred and so beautiful. Each day I have breath holds a remarkable piece of God’s love and majesty that I can be thankful for—praise God for. I simply need to notice.

In a few hours, 2018 will bid goodbye and 2019 will unlock new doors of opportunities and struggles, of delights and woes. Today is a threshold of the old and the new, of what has been and what’s to come. I can’t help but feel awkward musing about all this. The uncertainty of what’s to come is uncomfortable yet the absoluteness of God’s sovereignty is encouraging. Such contrasts to deal with and process in a short time!

But if there is one thing I truly learned this year, more so than any other time I can remember, it’s this: Life happens so fast; it’s a waste of time to try to hold on to anything except God. Each day I have to be purposeful in remembering this and living this way. I get so caught up with schedules and plans and goals and desires for self; I have no space left in me for Him. Sometimes, I get so absorbed working for God, I forget about God.

So my prayer this 2019 is for me to learn to spend each day I have the privilege of having practicing His Presence wherever I am, whatever I am doing, whoever I am with. To not forget Him, but to live with intentionality in Him—growing in gratitude, in humility, in love, in kindness, in grace. This is easier said than done, but this is what I hope my 2019 would be all about.

I look forward for a deeper, more intimate adventure with my God, the Mighty One, the High and Lofty One who inhabits eternity, whose name is Holy (Isaiah 57:15), however He chooses to do it and to what heights He wants to take me.

I leave this word to you both as an encouragement and a challenge.

Isaiah 57:15 New Living Translation (NLT)

15 The high and lofty one who lives in eternity,
the Holy One, says this:
“I live in the high and holy place
with those whose spirits are contrite and humble.
I restore the crushed spirit of the humble
and revive the courage of those with repentant hearts.

Happy New Year to you all! Grab onto God like never before!

In Our Messiah’s Love,