I am at the start of a new year.  Because I got another year older.  But I am choosing to focus on the part about starting a fresh, new thing, instead of the wow-a-lot-has-happened-over-the-course-of-my-very-long-long-long-life.

I love new things, don’t you?  I love fresh starts and second chances.  I love beginnings and renewals and refreshment.  They are always so full of hope, so anything-amazing-can-happen.

Listmaker that I am,  a new year or season or even month (not to mention any Monday morning) will get me looking ahead with excitement and hope and jotting notes about all the things I want to see and experience and accomplish and produce and become…

Today, this:

I want to unleash my creativity (it’s been much too locked away) and have all the crazy creative thoughts I can find that will lead to a life of abundant fruitfulness and productivity and wholehearted living.  Because wholeheartedness is HUGE to me (why be anything else, ever?) and it includes being both WHOLE (this is me cooperating with the work of God in my life in all areas: spirit, soul and body) and HOLY (which can come about only by the completed work of Christ and the blood He shed).  This is actually possible because of the aaaa-mazing GRACE of God, “the empowering work of the Holy Spirit to be everything God created us to be and to do everything He created us to do.”**

Yep.  On my list.  Happy New Year!

**That definition of grace came from James Ryle at his conference Grace! Grace! Grace! sometime back in the 1990s.