Happy New Year!

After anticipating the new year for several weeks now (I kept on accidentally writing “2019” for the date), I’m happy that the calendar has finally turned! Zach and I kept up our tradition of ringing in the new year with my friend Amy, accompanied by board games, cocktails, and entirely too much cheesy food.

As I reflect on 2018, I think about the goals I scribbled on a note and stuck on the refrigerator a year ago: “Grow food. Share knowledge. Build community.” Looking at each of those intentions, I feel pretty happy. We grew several hundred pounds of food (not to mention all the miscellaneous trees, shrubs, and herbs that we planted), I blogged fairly regularly to share what I’d learned, and we made some moves to plug in more to our local community. 

Last year’s intentions came pretty naturally, but this year I set to work overthinking my intentions for 2019. After a ton of back-and-forth, I ended up with three words:

Explore,

Design, 

Create!

Although this list sounds suspiciously like an inspirational string that would end up written on a t-shirt in a saccharine font, each of these words has a lot of meaning to me. Specifically...

Explore new experiences, step outside your comfort zone, and be relentlessly curious.

Design your life with intention, simplicity, and abundance.

Create art, memories, and joy more; consume things less.

(Side note: The “design” point was inspired by a book I just read called Designing Your Life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans. Highly recommended!)

Even with their broad scope, these are only part of the picture as I continue to grapple with questions like, “What does God want me to do?”, “What does true community look like?”, “What does ‘being like Jesus’ really mean in a 21st-century context?”, and more. Still, I hope these words will act as a compass to keep me on track through the next year. 

Here’s to a joyful and abundant 2019— God bless you all. Happy New Year!

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