Stay resolute, for God’s sake

MICHELE MARR

Christmas, secular and sacred, has passed. The new year and the buzz

and business of New Year’s resolutions are here.

It’s not my favorite time at the gym, which goes from sparsely

populated, or at worst full, to overflowing. Exercise and diet plan

books and complementary cookbooks are selling in record numbers for

the year.

Career, financial and debt counselors are doing brisk business.

Day-planners and motivational tapes are selling well. The calendars

of personal trainers and professional organizers are chock-full.

Nicotine replacements, gum and patches for would-be nonsmokers are

flying off drugstore shelves. A blizzard of prescriptions for Zyban

and nicotine inhalers is sweeping pharmacies.

Each year for the past 20 years I have said, “Hallelujah. Thank

God I quit.” After 20 years of smoking, I stubbed out my last

non-filtered Camel in 1984 and never looked back.

It didn’t take gum or patches or inhalers or even a New Year’s

resolution to do it. It took love and, I suspect on my part, more

than a little grace from God, for which I begged.

The man I was dating, who I would soon marry, told me in the most

tender way that he really did not enjoy the smoke or the smell.

God’s grace had broken bad habits of mine before and this time,

with the patient support of my husband, it did again.

New Year’s resolutions, traditional as making them with the idea

of turning over a new leaf might be, never worked for me. So there

came a time when I resisted acting on the guilt of holiday and other

immoderations, and I passed.

This year, though, maybe because a bad cold or mild flu kept me

mostly in bed from the day after Christmas until several days after

January, first with too much time to ruminate, I found myself curious

about who started the New Year’s resolution tradition.

Several sources I found on the Internet, among them

how-to-keep-your-new-years- resolution.com and historytelevision.ca,

attribute its beginnings to the Babylonians.

The guy who put together the how-to-keep-your-new-years-

resolution website framed my curiosity like this: “Who’s to blame,

and do they have an e-mail address so we can flame them?”

His answer is more or less the same as the one at the History

Television site, but not as elaborate.

“The Babylonians celebrated New Year’s Day [more than] 4,000 years

ago, although their celebration was in March rather than in January,

coinciding with the spring planting of crops.”

It makes more sense to me if the deal is all about renewal.

Resolutions, according to how-to-keep-your-new-years- resolution.com,

“are a reflection of the Babylonians’ belief that what a person does

on the first day of the New Year will have an effect throughout the

entire year.”

And it might. But for most of the people I know, the effect is

only rarely what they intended. Instead, by March they feel so busted

for not exercising five days a week that they give up and don’t even

exercise three.

By July they are donating a stack of diet and exercise books to

the Friends of the Library and still paying off the bill for a

NordicTrack machine.

That’s how it was for me when I made my New Year’s resolutions. My

spirit was willing but my flesh was, and still is, weak.

It was like that too for the guy who put together the how-to-

keep-your-new-years-resolution website, until, he says, he got some

perspective and a plan of action.

Which is pretty much what happened to me in a way: I saw myself

from God’s perspective, as beloved but reprobate. Then I started

practicing the Christian faith, which is, after all, all about

renewal.

And it comes lock-stock-and-barrel with a plan for changing bad

habits and attitudes, or sins as the church frankly calls them, even

when it takes a lifetime.

I discovered God’s grace and sacraments -- including the unpopular

practice of self-examination and confession -- as a means of his

grace to transform me. I found prayer and worship and the

encouragement of fellow followers of Christ.

With these things I start anew each day, resisting temptation and

changing, little by little, not by the strength of my willpower but

by the power of God’s Holy Spirit.

The speed bumps I’ve discovered are repentance.

I can be sincere as the devil about wanting to change my bad

habits and attitudes, all the while holding on to those things that

stand in the way of God’s grace just as though they were treasures.

How grateful I am that I have the chance to let go, not once every

year, but every morning, every hour, every minute.