The Gospel for When January Feels Mean
/Every year between Christmas and New Year’s, I start to feel panicky. I can hear January lacing up her Nikes, and I know she’s coming for me. GO AWAY! WE WERE ALL HAVING SO MUCH FUN UNTIL YOU SHOWED UP. I’m afraid of her because I think she’s mean and will knock these Christmas cookies out of my hands and make me eat fistfuls of lettuce instead. I turned off the lights, and I’m pretending no one is home, but MAN she is persistent. It must be the endorphins. JANUARY, GET YOUR GIANT LIST OF GOALS OUT OF MY FACE BECAUSE IT’S BLOCKING MY VIEW OF THE HALLMARK CHANNEL. (I just started sort of liking these movies, and I’m so proud of me for growing a soul.)
Here’s my position on the month of January: I hate her, and she’s rude. I don’t want everyone to get back to business. I want us to keep wearing the silly sweaters and looking at the twinkly lights and DRINKING THE CHOCOLATE. (Seriously—drinking literal chocolate is CELEBRATED and ENCOURAGED in December, but January will shame you and make you switch to unsweetened green tea or something else that tastes like an old man’s beard. No, I say! No!)
Anyone else feel... bullied by January? Oppressed by all the goals and optimism? Grumpy about the way Christmas just slipped through our fingers? WE’D FINALLY STOPPED PREPPING FOR THE CELEBRATION AND STARTED ACTUALLY CELEBRATING AND NOW WE HAVE TO CLEAN UP THE CONFETTI AND TALK ABOUT BUDGETS AND GIVE UP CAFFEINE AND ORGANIZE THE PANTRY! January, why do you hate happiness so much?! WHY?!!!!
I think I annually pitch this fit because I’ve personified January and allowed her to represent the perfectionism that regularly claws at me and threatens my soul-health. It’s great to avoid perfectionism (I regularly have to remind myself that Jesus is the only perfect human), but sometimes I go so far that I become blobby slob sloth Caroline. Sometimes BSSC seems like the only option if I don’t want to be count-every-calorie, check-every-to-do, disappoint-no-one Caroline. (AND I SURE DON’T, BECAUSE SHE HAS ZERO FUN.) But believing you only have two options is a persuasive device called “false dilemma.” It’s like when we tell people “Love it or leave it.” There are other options than just loving or leaving. (Like, they’re probably allowed to stick around and hate it.)
There are other options for January besides Evil Perfectionist Caroline, who can’t even look at at Oreo, and Blobby Slob Sloth Caroline, who ate all the Oreos. (She’s sorry.) (No she’s not.)
But I forget this every year, right about December 26. I feel the familiar panic rise up, I pitch a wild fit, and then I take a deep breath and remember the other options.
So here’s a word for my friends who are a little allergic to January — the ones who feel anxious and overwhelmed by the idea of goal setting, the ones who know how to settle into December celebrations quite nicely and sometimes refuse to come out after the New Year’s countdown:
Release yourself from the burden of newness. Many of us have friends who are excited and eager to pick it up this burden, to see how far they can run with it. We are the more cynical type, maybe a bit lazier, and we know if we try to pick it up, it’ll get too heavy too fast and it’ll smush us. So we just beat it to the punch, lying down before it can lay us out. But here’s the thing about the burden of newness: it’s not ours. Throughout scripture, we see God doing new things and mankind doing the same old thing. Truly, God is the only one who can make things new—the only one who can bring about change. Instead of hustling to renew ourselves or manufacture change, we can fix our gaze on the One Who Makes Things New. Because the burden of newness is not ours, we can toss out the cynicism and forgo the slothfulness. We can stand up, eager and ready to do whatever God asks of us, to yield our wills to whatever he wants to begin in us.
Before you begin, rest in what’s finished. Your sin, your shame, your righteousness, your identity, your place — all of it is finished, secured and safe because of Jesus’s work on the cross. We do not have to strive to secure what has already been secured. Instead, we rest. When we hear hisses that question what’s fixed, when we are tempted or overwhelmed by goals that promise to fix what’s already been fixed, we stomp our feet a bit on the gospel foundation we stand upon and say, “Yep, it’s still true. Yep, it’s still strong beneath my feet. Yep, it’s still done, there’s nothing I could have done to do it, and there’s nothing I can do to undo it.”
January, you are not the boss of us—God is.
Resolutions, you are not the pathway to newness and change—God is.
December, you are not our source of comfort and joy—God is.
We stand up in faith, eager to do the good work before us, determined to trust God for all of these things, in 2019 and always.
A small collection of verses on newness:
Isaiah 43:18-19
Isaiah 65:17
Ephesians 2:15
Ephesians 4:20-24
Hebrews 8:13
Revelation 21:1-5
UPDATE FOR 2020: I’m offering 25% off The Simple Study Binder, Simple Discipleship, and Simple Discipleship for Ages 9-13 from now until 1/3/2020. I’m praying God will use these tools (which I use personally!) to remind you of the finished work of Christ and bring about transformation in the new year. Use coupon code MEANJANUARY.
