Resolute Non-resolutions (Journal reflections from the dawn of a new year)

New years are for new beginnings.

Today, I make no resolutions. They are born of flesh and human resource and pride. They are short-lived and cannot change my heart.

Today, as I welcome the new year, I'm thinking of a new way of seeing. A new way of being in this world. I'm thinking about a way of living in alignment with who I already am in Christ--a practice of walking in agreement with His identity. This means I will practice putting off any and all identities I have tried to fashion for myself.

I am not my costume of flesh, nor am I any of the roles my costume plays. Daughter, sister, aunt, friend, introvert, hiker, kayaker, adventure-lover, cook, musician, singer. Fill in your own blanks.

I am not who I think I ought to be, or who I think others expect me to be, or who I wish I could be in my deepest heart. I am not some idealistic fantasy alter-ego, created in the playground of my mind.

Above all, I am not the author of my own story. I am not in control of my own life. I do not exist for my own pleasure and glory.

I am not God.

But by the grace of God, I am what I am...
and by the grace of God, I will be what I will be in this coming year, and in whatever days He gives me.

By the grace of God, I will be what He makes of me.

Father spoke this to my heart during the New Years' Eve prayer service with my church:

"Stop identifying with yourself. Stop identifying with your blindness. Identify yourself only with Me."

It's true. I have perpetually identified myself with everything I am not, everything I lack, and all the ways in which I fail. Do you hear the theme? I have made myself the focus of my attention, and I've hated what I see.

If you can even call it seeing.

Rather, I've been blinded by all the judgment and offense I hold against myself, my circumstances, and my life for not being...More. Better. Worthy. Desirable. Whatever I think they ought to be.

Jesus said that our eyes are the lamp of our bodies. If the eye (perspective) is healthy, the whole body is full of light, but if the eye (perspective) is bad, the whole body is full of darkness (blinded). And if the light in me (what I think I can see) is darkness, how great indeed is that darkness! (Matthew 6:22-23)

The only way to see out of this darkness is to repent (turn) from my self-identification and choose to identify myself with the Light.

Jesus, the Light, is everything that I am not. He came to be everything that I can never be.  He didn't come to make me a better me. He came to take me, hopelessly sick with sin, to death on the cross with Him. He came to make me an entirely new creation, buried into His death, and raised to a new, utterly different, life with Him!

And this new life, this "new Kari" as it were, is hidden with Christ in God (Colossians 3:3).

Why, then, would I ever identify myself with the old, dead, sin-sick Kari?! This is madness. What should be light inside me turns to darkness, and the new eyes are blinded by an ancient, deadly condemnation of self and the world...a venom that would, if possible, condemn even God as a liar!

"God is light, and in Him is no darkness at all. If we say we have fellowship with Him while we walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth. But if we walk in the light as He is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus His Son cleanses us from all sin." (1 John 1:5-7)

So today I repent. Today I turn from the darkness of self-identification, and I turn to the light of identifying with Jesus Christ.

I will walk in the light as He is in the light, for,
"when He appears, we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is." (1 John 3:2)
and,
"as He is, so also are we in this world." (1 John 4:17)

"And everyone who thus hopes in Him purifies himself, as He is pure." (1 John 3:3)

This is my hope and prayer in all the days to come:

I would know Christ, and Him crucified, and my life hidden with Christ in God. I would know (experience) His love and abide intimately in the reality of that love. I would walk in the Light, being as he is in this world.

I would live in Christ.



(Credits to my kindred-spirit-favorite-author Ted Dekker for some of the inspiration behind these reflections. Specifically The Way of Love, The 49th Mystic, and Rise of the Mystics by Ted Dekker)