Just in case you were wondering, no, the title of this blog post is not a typo.

When I signed up a few months back to write posts for WOF in January, I thought that the topic “New Beginnings” would be easy. But now I’m wondering why I thought so! The truth is that when it comes to New Year’s celebrations, resolutions, and excitement, I’m kind of a “scrooge”…(If you will allow me to steal a Christmas phrase and apply it to New Years.) While I enjoyed staying up until midnight and getting my first New-Year’s kiss EVER, once I crawled in bed dead tired I wondered why I had bothered staying up so late. After all, January first is just another day.

Some people may say I am sadly unmotivated, as I haven’t made a “New Year’s Resolution” in probably 5-10 years. And the ones that I have made I don’t think I’ve ever kept.

See, when you make a New Year’s Resolution, this is usually what happens . . . LIFE! You decide to read your Bible every day, go on a diet, exercise daily, wake up on time and never sleep in, or a myriad of other tedious goals . . . and then you get sick, get invited to a party, your husband calls in the middle of the night, you get in a car accident. Things just inevitably happen to keep you from sticking true to all of those high goals. So after you fall asleep during your Bible reading, eat that all-too-wonderful slice of chocolate cake, and lounge on the couch watching movies all day, you feel like a failure and wonder why you ever tried. After missing a day of success you feel like it’s much easier to just live your life the way you always have.

Is anyone else relating to this?

But life doesn’t have to keep us from living successfully. Yes, it can throw a kink in our well-made goals, but it doesn’t have to make us quit.

This is why I have adopted a slightly different philosophy for my life: I take things “one day at a time.”  What is a year? 365 days is all it is. While keeping a promise or a goal every one of those days is nigh impossible, making improvements each day is much more attainable.

The time where I realized this concept the most was when my husband was deployed for a year to Afghanistan. I would wake up in the morning, look at my countdown calendar, and be filled with despair and wonder how I could possibly make it through the next “x” amount of months. But each time I would try to shake my head of all the negativity and focus on TODAY. I would say to myself, “Aprille, just try to make it through today, and don’t worry about the rest of the deployment.”

I had a lot of bad days, but I probably had more good days than bad. Each time I found myself discouraged about the deployment, I would write it off as “just a bad day . . . tomorrow will be better.”

So, if you have made some grand New Year’s resolutions, I admire you for your courage and dedication. But let me encourage you by saying this: Don’t let one day of life, failure, or fatigue keep you from reaching your goals. If you find yourself faltering, go to bed, sleep it off, and try again tomorrow. Take this year one day at a time, and I think you will find that at the end of 2010 you will be a better person because of all you have gone through.

“Tomorrow is always fresh with no mistakes in it.” (Anne Shirley, as written by L.M. Montgomery)

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