Before we went out to the most lovely place in town...
In my last post, I talked about how I feel like I've become lazy with doing the things I love and care about. I also reviewed my last year's version of New Years Resolutions, and realized I didn't do terrible, despite the fact I never even looked at my resolutions much after I wrote them down.
This year, I'm going to try something different. I saw this on another blog, and I now don't remember what blog this was, but it suggested choosing a word or a theme for the year rather than setting specific resolutions. I want to use the word seek, because last year, my biggest failure was in not seeking God nearly enough. The word seek can be used in every area I'd like to focus on and improve on in this upcoming year, and all of those things should be centered by seeking God in all things.
Here are some ways that I want to "seek" this year:
1. Seek God. Pray more, set specific time aside for seeking Him. Seek areas to serve in my church.
2. Seek to show God's love in my marriage. Seek to love Nick better.
3. Seek to care about approval and impressing others less in all areas of life, especially my job. Seek true and good reasons to do my best in all areas of life.
4. Seek to be thankful and enjoy each day. Seek to complain less. This will be a hard one for me.
5. Seek to enjoy and stress less while spending time with people I love (especially when visiting family). Seek to show God's love in my relationships with others.
6. Seek to spend time doing things I enjoy and chasing after passions that I keep shoving to the side because "I don't have time."
7. Seek overall health. Seek movement in ways that I enjoy most.
I feel like these look pretty identical to my resolutions last year. The difference (not big) is that I want to center everything even more around seeking God in ALL of these areas- I won't excel if I don't. Also, I liked the resolutions or "intentions" that I had last year, so this is just another year to try my best at the things I love and care about most.
Nick and I seek a lot of the listed things together. Doing life with my best friend is awesome. And today we decided that we are going to seek after health together in a new and challenging way starting on Monday.
Whole 30. I've looked into this before and thought that it would be way too hard. But as we looked over the guidelines today, we realized it might be a wonderful, meaningful, and doable challenge if we do it together. I feel like Whole 30 is just a more extreme version of Paleo.
Let me talk about Paleo for just a second. I meant to document my experience much more on the blog, but I am not the best at writing on here. Basically, Paleo was the best health choice I've made in my 25 years. I felt amazing, I was never bloated. I loved the food I was eating. I enjoyed cooking. But then the holidays came and I just wasn't as committed as I should have been to something that I know is best for my health.
I am going at it even more committed this time for a longer- term solution. I want it to just become the way that I eat on a daily basis, which it did for a couple of months before. I feel like Whole 30 will be a way to jump in to a Paleo lifestyle by starting with a cleanse from all things processed. We bought the book and some kitchen essentials, and we're going all in on Monday. I look forward to documenting some of our experience here!
Happy 2015, friends! May you seek to spend time and energy on the things you care about most this year!
