Happy 2025 to you! I hope you have had a blessed Advent season and are preparing for the year ahead.
I enjoy this time of year. New Year’s resolutions are right up my alley. I love the challenge of improving spiritually, emotionally, and physically. In James Clear’s Atomic Habits, Clear popularized the idea of habit stacking: linking a new habit you want to form with a habit you already faithfully perform.
In past years, I’ve added the habits of reading through the Bible in a year, memorizing scripture, working out, and other disciplines. This year I will try something different: I’m resolving to do less.
In The Common Rule, Justin Whitmel Earley explains that there are two types of disciplines: those that embrace God and our neighbor, and those that resist the world for the sake of God and our neighbor. I tend to thrive on the embrace disciplines (such as reading scripture, prayer, study, corporate worship, and gatherings). I’ve struggled with the disciplines of resistance (such as silence and solitude). Earley urges us that while we might think that limits constrain freedom, “the right limits create freedom.”
Our world of ever-present input befits my personality well. And many forms of input are beneficial for my soul. The world and my personality drag me away from silence and listening. But I know that I need to learn to listen. What good is my relationship with God if it is primarily a monologue from me to God? How can I grow in repentance if I do not provide space for the Holy Spirit to convict me?
And so this year, I am resolving to do less. I will try to watch fewer shows, spend less time on social media, and even read fewer books. Instead, I want to create more time in silence and solitude, resisting my flesh and the world and pressing into the heart of God.
Like my other habits, I know this habit of resistance won’t happen on a wish and a prayer. I need to build these spaces into my schedule and create rhythms that sustain the new habits.
Would you like to join me?
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Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash