Live Full

Taking time to regroup, rest, and enjoy home and family over the holidays was refreshing. Happy New Year everyone!!

We are into the second year of non-0-years (oh). It will be nearly nine decades before there will be another o-year. We'll likely all be in eternity by then. So, here we are in the 20-years, twenty eleven for now.

That's weird, I know. But it helps me look closer at the time I live in, and to think about what I did with the last year of life I was given. What did I do with that flash?

I love to write down goals and look back on what I accomplished. It is really interesting. A few years after I had started doing this I found out that studies show that if you write this stuff down (and apparently only 3% of us actually do this), that you have a really high chance (a percentage I can't remember...) of achieving them. I have found this to be true. So, it's fun you should try it!

This year as I looked back at last year and wrote down a few more things for the coming year many things came to mind.

I thought about the many people I knew who have died this past year. Some lived full lives that impacted many for good, like my Grandma Josephine Carli for example. I cherish the memories and look forward to eternity. Others lives were cut short by tragedy or bad decisions.

The older I get the darker this world gets, I guess just because I'm sadly more aware of the real effects of sin in each of our lives. My shortcomings and others' combined. It's a tangled mess. But not to be discouraged, the light of eternity is getting brighter all the time too - chasing away the night.

Those are sort of heavy thoughts to start out the year, but thankfully it makes me more stubborn to live a life that is less about escape and more about joy and living fully.

Since I probably didn't make you laugh in this blog quite yet, perhaps I should share that on Christmas morning before we all opened our gifts we saw two eagles perched in a tree back along the river. We all looked out the window over the fields of sparkling snow and Dexter said excitedly, "Did Mom open her binoculars yet?!"

No, she didn't.

Photo of Shelley looking up from the spinning planet while climbing a ladder, by trevorleephotography.com