As is my habit toward the end of every year, I recently starting cleaning out my office. Before I am finished I will have touched virtually every nook and cranny of my small office. It’s also likely that I’ll change it around for a different look going into the New Year.

In the process of purging and cleaning I came across a blog written by my former pastor titled, “On the New Year.”  It was written on December 31, 2009.

As I read it through again I thought on Victory Call and how appropriate it would be to share it with you at the close of 2012. We’ll never pass this way again, dear ones. So as we consider the days and weeks to come may the following blog be food for thought. After you’ve finished reading, pause, pray, ask God for clear, focused intentional direction for the year 2013 and then follow wherever He leads.

On the New Year
“I have just a few thoughts as we embark on another new year. I have come to value this holiday increasingly as the years have passed. As a child it meant no more than I got to stay up past midnight on New Year’s Eve. Today it means that I have a chance to pause, to think, to evaluate, to set goals, to take stock of life.

Gayline (his wife) asked me last evening if I’d be willing to take some time this evening to talk over our personal and family goals for 2010. It was a great idea (she’s got lots of them!), so that’s part of what we’re going to do.

I suspect that this is going to lead us toward a few goals like these:
1. Make sure that we’re both going hard and happy after God in 2010.
2. Make sure that we’re going hard and happy after personal character and faith in 2010 by mortifying specific sins of which we’re aware and bringing to life the fruit of the Spirit.
3. Make sure that we’re going hard and happy after Truth in 2010, through daily reading of the Word and extensive reading of the Truth-gold that others have written.
4. Make sure that we’re both going hard and happy after each other in 2010.
5. Make sure we’re both going hard and happy after our children and grandchildren in 2010.
6. Make sure that we’re both going hard and happy after our spiritual family in the church in 2010.
7. Make sure that we’re going hard and happy after good nutrition and exercise in 2010 that we might seize whatever years we have left with as much energy and good health as it’s in our power to develop.
8. Make sure that we’re going hard and happy after joy–in all God is, and all God does–in 2010.

Now if we are enabled to apply specifics to all of this, all in the strength which God supplies, it will prove to be a God-filled year.”1

Dear sisters, I hope at least one of these goals prompted you to consider some specific area of your life to go hard after God, seeking Him for the change your soul longs for. Let’s go for it together in 2013, and allow the God of our salvation, the truest Lover of our souls to be in us Peace, Joy and Love. After all, as His redeemed daughters, it’s all about Him or it’s about nothing at all.

Stephanie Paul

Stephanie Paul, wife and mother of two grown children. An “instrument of change” in the Redeemer’s Hand, in the lives of wounded and hurting women. Currently serving as a part of the Addiction Recovery Team at America’s Keswick as Woman of Character Program Director.

 1 http://tfcfreetruth.blogspot.com/2009/12/on-new-year.html