Article December 27, 1999 Issue

New Year's resolutions Who needs them?

Make a lifelong resolution to let Christ into your life.

By Nancy Louise Ranks

Every New Year's Eve, my friends and I used to resolve to stop doing something. Like smoking. The first year I firmly resolved to stop smoking, my resolution lasted about two hours into the new year.

Another year, some of us resolved to lose weight by not eating sweets. My effort in that direction quickly fell by the wayside. Over the years my friends and I made many resolutions, but none of us ever managed to keep any of them.

Eventually, God became a greater influence in my life. I still felt the urge to make a resolution about something on New Year's Eve. But what could I resolve to do that I would do? I no longer wanted to make promises to myself that I could not keep. Breaking a promise to myself now seemed very wrong; it felt like lying to myself. I also realized that our resolution making had been based upon self-will rather than upon the fact that God, through divine wisdom, supports right decisions by providing right ideas and right actions. I remembered this sentence from Science and Health: "Right motives give pinions to thought, and strength and freedom to speech and action" (p. 454). This told me that if my motive was pure, then God would give me all the ideas and strength I needed to carry the idea to fruition. This in turn would liberate me from something or give me the freedom to accomplish something.