New Year’s resolutions feel more like chains than wings to me. I want freedom to become rather than strictures to conform. I would follow my heart’s inclinations rather than set a behavioral agenda, unsaddle my soul from demands and expectations and deadlines. I hope to be open and welcoming of each day, to receive what it brings, rather than insist that it yield rewards for my labors. May I rather grow like a tree: when the rain falls, suck it up; when the spring pushes up sap, sprout leaves; when obstacles crowd me, shape myself around them. Our backyard black walnut has no limb-growing, root-digging schedule, but it blossoms out well into its true self.
I think we have less control over our journey, our growth process, than we realize, and if relationship is foundational to our development, then growth is necessarily interactive and intertwined and cannot be a simple matter of my own choosing and acting. An organic, inter-relational spirituality looks more like a tree than a construction project: much more vulnerable to change, but also much more adaptive; much less structured and predictable, but much more expansive and potent. Both methods of development have set principles, but a plant has far more freedom of expression in living out those principles.
So I welcome 2014 and whatever it might bring, not because ours is a safe and good world, but because I have a loving and gentle God who promises to be with me in all the coming uncertainty.
Janathan Grace Reflections 
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