Here is the problem with New Year’s Resolutions, I never keep them.  I have no will power.  Creature of habit that I am, I have no history of being able to change my habits for longer than about 6 minutes.  I am honest about it with myself and others so mostly I don’t care much for the New Year’s Resolutions.

That being said, 2011 was a year of great bit Change with a capital C.  Life-altering Change.  My mind has gone slightly numb and tingly around the edges because there is so much of this Change.  After a while I started to actually feel good about the changes that were happening.  I embraced new patterns, people, ideas.  Went back to school.  Made it through several big transitions at work.  And there was one thing that bothered me through it all though.

While I was busy dealing with all this capital C Change, I stopped doing pretty much all the  basic, healthy adults thing that I needed to do to sustain my life.  I kept paying my bills and sleeping.  I didn’t starve or lose my car.  But I stopped cleaning on a regular basis, finishing my blogs on deadline, grocery shopping, cleaning the fridge, cooking, working out, talking regularly with my family and friends (expect for passively stalking them on The Facebook.  I promise I’ve been lovingly stalking you on The Facebook, friends and family).

My mom would be horrified.  Frankly, I was a little horrified at myself.  I missed my friends and I didn’t blame them for not calling because I was never around to answer the phone.  I didn’t want to live with a layer of filth on every dish I owned or worse yet, have mounds of take-out trash in the kitchen.  I gained 20 pounds on top of the *cough* pounds I had already packed on.  

I would go to bed and wake up saying, “GAH!  I have got to Get. It. Together!”

So I didn’t make a New Year’s Resolution.  In fact, I’m waiting until February to post this even though I wrote it the first week of January just so it won’t look like a resolution.  

I am giving 2012 a subtitle and I am declaring 2012’s subtitle to be

 2012: The Year of Getting My Stuff Together

(I may or may not be using a slightly more vulgar term in my head.  I’ll never tell.)  The shortened name (Thanks, Hannah) is 2012: GMST and the plan is simple.  I’ve got a list of things that I need to do in order for my life to return to some sense of grown up put-togetheredness.  The big overarching themes I have developed are based on things I yell at myself on a regular basis like…

• Eat Something Other Than Carbs, Cheese, and Sugar!  (Eating a Healthier Diet)
• Good Grief, You Should be Able to Chase Those Teens during clothespin tag! (Working Out)
• What the What!  Where is all the money?! (Learn to manage the money)
• Man, I miss (fill in the blank) I Should Talk to Them!  (Being a better communicator with friends and family)
• What is All This Stuff and Why Does it Fall Out of the Closet Every Time I Open it??  and it’s closely related counterpart Oh, Crap!  Is that tomorrow?!(Cleaning and Organization)

So far, I haven’t done too bad.  I’ve created a new note and calendar space in my house, moved the furniture so I can work out at home, and sort-of, kind-of done a Cleanse.  I have big plans for February (a post for another time).  I’m feeling fairly confident that I can make this thing work.  I’m going to feel even more confident now that I’m putting it out into the world.  

Updates to come.

Dear FH,

I’m trying.  Really I am.  I promised myself over and over I would not get sucked into the crazy, but I’m about one cute picture away from falling.  And really, what would it hurt to just do a little, not much really, and the whole time I promise, it would just be for fun.  Wait, NO!

I will not plan our wedding before I meet you.

*Grits teeth and turns face away from Pintrest*  Will.  Not.  Preplan.  Wedding.

I have always been a firm believer that the wedding is just an event, a celebration like any other, that should require only a touch more attention, consideration, or resources than any other big celebration.  After all, it’s the marriage that’s really the important part. Couples (read: girls) should be excited for the marriage, not just the wedding.  My parents had a small, family wedding with six weeks of planning and they have had a pretty great marriage from what I can tell.  Plus, I’m a realist, not a romantic, and throwing perfectly good money at a cake that will last 30 minutes instead of making a mortgage payment seems silly to me on so many levels.

But it is seriously harder than you think to hold back.  Pintrest and friend’s weddings and celebrity weddings are all so fun and cute and the other day I saw someone who did centerpieces for their tables out of books and despite how I try I keep thinking, “Oh, I would love to do that at my wedding.”  It seems so easy and harmless.  But the whole notion that there is even such a thing as MY wedding as opposed to OUR wedding is crazyness.  

Plus, it is distinctly possible that you will never get to be my future husband if in the very start of our relationship you follow me on Pintrest after I make some small suggestion about a recipe we should try and you find pin-boards labelled wedding, children’s rooms, future vacations, all planned out for your convenience. 

The last thing I want is to make plans without you then, promptly upon accepting your proposal, pull out the virtual version of a three ring binder with thousands of clippings of exactly what our wedding will look like.  Or worse, be forever secretly disappointed when our wedding doesn’t turn out anything like how it looked online.

So I’m going to do my best to hold off, hoping that you won’t mind too much when during our wedding planning I keep shouting, “I know I saw that somewhere!!  Where did I see that?!?”  Sorry in advance for that.

Dear 16 year old Me,

I’ve watched enough time-travel themed science fiction to be a little terrified to write this letter.  If a butterfly flaps its wings and all that, you know what I mean. I love the life that I am living right now enough to not want to change a single thing about the past that brought me here.  Which should be encouraging to you since this awesome life will someday be yours.  

But it also sort of sucks for you, 16 year old Me, because things are not going to be easy.  Along with being fantastically awesome, they are going to be complicated and painful and confusing.  No matter how scared I am of accidentally changing my now by changing the past, I do very much want to take the edge off some of the hurt you are going to experience.

So maybe just some suggestions for you along the way.

You are a nerd.  Not a cool kid, a nerd.  The sooner stop fighting it, embrace eality and sort of just lay back into it, the better it will be for you and for everyone around you.  Believe it or not, at some point in the future it will be fantastically cool to be nerdy and you will take great pride in your nerdy sensibility.

You will never stop hating to exercise.  Suck it up and do it anyway. 

Don’t date a boy just because he shows interest or because it is convenient.  And don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about.  *Give you the knowing grown up stare*  It just keeps ending up the way it has so far.  Instead, pursue the boys you like even if they don’t like you back.  Learn how to flirt and talk to them with some level of confidence, because if you can do that, you are going to end up a lot less bitter and more able to build relationships with guys in the future.

Don’t paint your room that color!  It will forever look like you live inside of a pastel dinner mint. 

You are going to hate this next bit, and I’m sorry for that.  If it helps, I don’t want to write it very much either.  You need to break some rules.  Not big ones.  Don’t commit any felonies or permanently injure yourself pulling some sort of crazy stunt.  But you and I both know you are way, WAY too uptight for a 16 year old and scared to disappoint the people you love and you create these rules in your head because you think rules give you some kind of control in keeping everything the way it is supposed to be.  It doesn’t work that way.  I’m just finding out at almost 30 that doing things as perfectly as you can doesn’t automatically mean your life will be perfect.  So ask to go to that concert.  Dye your hair some crazy color.  Buy clothes with some character.  Make new friends.  Pierce something.  Don’t get out of the habit of wearing makeup.  Go out on the weekends.  Oh, and consequently, Mom and Dad are totally okay with you getting out there a little bit.  Christina and Alex are going do it and they don’t even bat an eyelash.

Invest in really nice suitcases.  You are going to get to travel a lot in the future and the only bummer will be your crappy suitcases.

Don’t stop writing.  You’ll get better the more you do it.

If you know nothing else, know that even when things get tough and you are unsure, you are never alone and you are always loved.  You have a great family, great friends now and in the future.  It won’t change what’s going on around you, but it will get you through.  

Oh, and don’t grow your hair out.  It looks good short, just learn to part it to the side.  

Good luck,

Future Julianna

This is also posted at Via Scribendi.

Dear Future Husband,

Recently, I was laying on the couch after being violently ill and I thought to myself, “This is why God didn’t want people to be alone.”  Not because life is necessarily easier with another person around, because many, many married people have explained to me that this is not true.  But because when a person is sick, like the kind of sick where you just lay and focus on breathing cause everything else is horrible, it is incredibly beneficial to have another person around to help.   

When you were little it was your mom.  Occasionally in college it was your roommate or your friends.  But when you are a single grown-up away from home you are expected to care for your own self which is awful.

It is incredibly helpful to have someone who can go get you applesauce because you are convinced that applesauce is going to make everything better despite all evidence to the contrary and you don’t have any applesauce that you could find in the 15 seconds that you were able to stand upright at the fridge.  It is helpful to have someone to bring you water or the remote when they are further than 18 inches from your body.  It is incredibly helpful to have someone remind you that in the 21st century in Chicago generally healthy people with health insurance don’t die from the stomach flu.

I promise you I will not act like a total child when I am sick.  I will clean up the bathroom in the 10 minutes of surprising vigor the stomach flu gives you just after you get sick.  I have no romantic notions of you holding back my hair or even getting within five feet of me.  I do, however, expect you to go to the grocery store to get the all-fruit Popsicles that I desperately need.  (When I go not only does it prolong the sick, but I run into school parents in my unwashed hair and pjs.  Not good for the professional image I try to maintain.)  I do expect you to be at least as comforting as my mom on the phone.  (Which I will warn you, makes me cry.)  I do expect for you to put the Harry Potter DVD in the player for me because I’m too pitiful to find it and I hate those Judge Judy courtroom drama shows.

Thank you in advance.  I’ll do the same for you when you are sick someday.

For you to understand the gravity of what 2011 means, you have to understand what happened in 2008-2010.  Now, most of you reading this were with me through this crazy couple of years and I am incredibly thankful for you.  However, you are about to be very bored by this next bit so feel free to jump down to the good stuff.  

For those of you just joining me, let me give you a quick run down of the last couple of years.  In 2008, I took a new Call to a new city (Chicago) and a new congregation.  Things were good.  Chicago is awesome.  Looking at starting a Master’s Degree.  Pastor resigned.  Ministry got stressful!  (There are not enough exclamation points to describe this level of stress.)  Put aside school and pretty much everything else but eating and sleeping for work.  Church money was tight and there were staff cutbacks.  Ministry got more stressful!  I tried dating which turned out to be an epic failure.  I tried dieting which turned out to be an epic failure.  I didn’t budget well so that was pretty much an epic failure.  Life got really hard and more than once I considered a life of monastic hermit-ism.   

Through all of this, my mantra was just keep being faithful until it gets better.  My sole focus was being faithful to my Call and to the community with which God had blessed me.  The people here were amazing and we worked together through it all.  But I did not plan for the future or think about what as going to happen once I got through that time.  I was in a holding pattern of hanging on and making it work until…frankly, I wasn’t entirely sure what was at the other end of this thing, but it was better, healthier, something else.  

In 2011, unexpectedly and beautifully life and ministry found their footing and turned around.  I bought my first new (to me) car that is safe to drive to the people I love.  My church got our new permanent pastor who is an amazing teammate and the kind of shepherd I could have only dreamed of having for our community.  I got crafty and made a bunch of new stuff in new ways to fill my need to do something else.  I went back to school to study something I love even though I have no idea what I’m going to do with this degree when I get it.  I cut my hair and everyone seems to think it looks great.  Our church combined our school with three other Lutheran churches and I got way more kids to love now.  

2011 was the year that I stopped having to wait for something better to finally happen.  Something shifted and I realized that I wasn’t waiting for things to change anymore.  It was here and I could just take the leap and go.  I don’t regret a minute of how God grew me in those difficult years, because it made the blessing of this year so much sweeter.  

2011 jump started my heart and my mind to do even more in 2012.  The way life changed and grew in 2011 means that 2012 is going to hold what I hope is going to be some more amazing change.  (There is a plan for 2012 in progress which I will reveal soon.  Going to be Great!)

But 2011 was a year full of new stuff, a year full of change.  It was a turning point year and I have never felt more grateful for the life and the blessings God has so richly poured out to me.  And that includes all of you.  Thank you and Happy New Year!

This blog is part of a syncro-blogging project called Via Scribendi.  Check it out!