My One WORD for the New Year

How choosing one word might help you face the New Year in a doable and workable way!

Photo by BoliviaInteligente on Unsplash

A new year is just ahead. The good Lord knows we need a new beginning. To help me begin again, I’ve chosen a single word to help me stay focused; reflect more deeply about and make choices in my life about this one, single but very important word.

Choosing one word for the New Year helps us narrow down all the infinite possibilities that are begging for our attention; helps us focus and gives us a clear path forward and gives us direction.

It’s been said, “How does one eat an elephant? And the answer is simply this: “One bite at a time.” It’s not a formula that guarantees a “happy new year.” But it more like a river that you’re going to swim in; wade in, play in and live in for the next twelve or so months.

How does one word really help someone tackle a whole new and daunting new year? Perhaps it is best doing it by choosing one word to focus on that will give guidance, offer motivation and give you perennial wisdom to draw upon for us.

My word for the New Year is: Health.

Health is more than physical health, as we often assume. Health, in the way, I mean has at least five dimensions:

-physical health

-emotional health

-relational health

-spiritual health

-vocational health.

Simply put, I want to become healthier in each of these five dimensions of my life. Let me break them down in bite size chunks to help us here. Don’t use my words, use my words to find your own but borrow them if you want—either way…but do try to find a word—some word—that is inviting you to journey with for the next twelve months or so.

Physical Health

Physical health involves the care of my body. It means a commitment on my end to not only care more about my body but to value it more than I ever have in my entire life.

Our bodies hold our autobiographies. The stories of our lives are held wrapped up in flesh and blood as well as muscles and fat cells. So, I am choosing to honor my body in a way I never have before. It’s taken a re-training of my mind to do this because in my case, it has not come naturally—that’s all a part of my story. In my story, one’s physical health was assumed. It was not thought of much. Heads mattered more. Heart mattered some but bodies mattered very, very little. But, as I’ve read the Scriptures, been coached by wonderful doctors and seen my story elongate in chronology, I now know that I am intricately and wonderfully made. My job is to embrace this truth and not only that, but to live this truth out in ways that marked by wisdom and truth… I want to now embody this truth.

It’s been said, in a best selling book that bears the title: The Body Keeps the Score. The body does indeed keep the score of our DNA, traumas and heredity. Fascinating isn’t it? Since I believe that is true, as we age, we find out things are beginning to add up in our own bodies and that plays itself out in our health. To value physical health now means, I must learn a new kind of math. I don’t think I always believed that 2 + 2= 4 when it comes to my body. Just think about it. What kind of math did you use when it came to your body? I watched a short video on aging well by a famous cardiologist last week. He said, the most important aspect of aging well is caring about what you eat. It’s all adding up for me and perhaps for some of you as well.

To do this means becoming more intentional about the care of my body; work in collaboration with my doctor about my health goals and stay on track. Collaboration is key word of me these days—a word that is so often not used or underused when it comes to health in any dimension. I know people who still refuse to go to doctors; won’t go to counselors and think spiritual direction is new age. It’s ridiculous, petulant and childish to remain this way.

For me, it all begins with an all important word about my health and it is to “desire health.” Everything begins with desire. For me to desire health means that as I’m tempted to eat things that aren’t healthy for my body, I can learn to hold the question in my mind: What is it that I’m really desiring right now? Is it health or is it Double Stuffed Oreos? What do I really want? Answering this question breaks down the huge health journey for me into simple, bite size ways to honor my health.

Emotional Health

The words of Peter Scazzero have become all important for me when it comes to understanding and valuing my emotional health. He said, “It is virtually impossible to become spiritually mature without becoming emotionally healthy.” I agree. To a large part, helping people deal with their past—that great place in our stories that is so often skipped through and ignored lies nearly all of our hidden issues that trip us up inside and in relationships with other— has been my work. But life itself s more than work. What I’ve found in marriage is that it is my past that so often collides with my wife’s past. Since both of us have major wounding in our past stories, we get triggered with each other—say things; come up against hemorrhaging wounds in our stories and storage compartments in our hearts that can trigger nuclear war between us and other people as well. When I get triggered, I can explode. So, becoming emotionally healthy starts with me and ends with me. I must become healthy to live a life of inner peace as well as any attempts to offer this peace to anyone else. Practically speaking, becoming more emotionally healthy for me means shaving offer rough edges where I get triggered and caught off guard.

To help me grow healthier emotionally, I want to embrace the following:

-Allow the power of nature to bring healing. Walk daily two miles in the forests and absorb the beauty and listen, listen and listen even more to my soul friends in the woods.

-Continue to explore unresolved areas in my past and sometimes, this means for many of us, doing this on a cellular level where the trauma is stored and accumulated.

-Talk my story out with trusted friends, safe people and competent professionals like counselors, spiritual directors and wise human beings who have an understanding of such stories.

-Practice what I call “Letting.” Saying the Welcome Prayer and embrace the beauty of acceptance—accepting the things and people I simply cannot change—no matter how hard I try and try. It was Amy Carmichael who wrote words, I never want to forget, “In acceptance, there is peace.” She wrote those words crippled, unable to walk and her mantra will become mine. (See my poem on Let and also the Welcome Prayer in Substack).

-Practicing boundaries—by not merging my life with other people’s lives, agendas and issues. I’m needing to discern people’s agendas for me and to follow my own. I get fuzzy and dizzy by not honoring where my life ends and yours begins. Boundaries simply help and are necessary to live well and be well.

Relational Health

In the New Year, I’m going to choose to be around and to live my life out with life-giving friends, not life-draining people. This means stepping in more with the people who make me laugh; ones I enjoy being with; people who stimulate me to think, expand and grow rather than shrink into a binary understanding of life: You’re in or You’re out—kind of thinking.

Since I want to enjoy freedom, it only makes sense for me to rub shoulders with people who are free indeed. This only makes sense.

Because I’m getting older each year, I want to invest in relationships that will walk with me to my grave and ones that I will walk to their grave. I want to go the long haul with a “few” not the “many.” My work has been for the “many” but my life now is one where I just need a “few” trusted, good and life giving people to walk with me. I am understanding this more and more and in my recovery as an extrovert, I’m seeing the beauty and pleasure of leaning to be more balanced in the volume of people I do my life with. The fruit of a quiet life fascinates me much more than the barren fruit of a fast life.

For me, this will look like having one time a week with a trusted, safe and wise friend where we can talk with no agenda, no study and let our hearts be the agenda for one another. As a couple, it will mean, having one time a week as couples where we can enjoy time, a meal, an activity and deeper conversation that will not be marked by theological schisms and political fissures. It will mean investing more in my own “Circle of Trust” that I am building with six other men in my town as we meet monthly to share our lives with one another. It will mean attending services at my church and helping where and as I can.

Spiritual Health

Toxic faith has been the area of my work as a doctor of the soul. I’ve dedicated my life to helping people find the showers where the mud, tar and poison of toxic faith can be washed away from deep inside their souls. In doing this work and for so long, I’m seeing how some of this toxicity has clung to fibers in my own soul. It’s amazing and astonishing how deeply we all have to work to find health in our faith. I believe that as the United States becomes more and more a “post-Christian” nation that we will find, alarming levels of toxicity in our faith and churches as we have surely compromised the intention of Jesus when he came to offer us light, hope and a whole new way of living. We are discovering that we have followed a way that Jesus never intended at all. I know some of you are not in churches that are declining but the fact remains, most are and there really are legimate and concerning reasons people are leaving the church in droves and living in isolation and giving up hope for community—at least the community that we used to think was within the walls of a church. Now this kind of community is being discovered in micro ways.

To stay alive spiritually, this coming year, I’m going to major on reading the famous, “Sermon on the Mount” found in Matthew 5-7. It’s three life altering chapters spoken by Jesus himself—without editors or redactors. It’s just Jesus at his best and we are living in a time we need the best Jesus we can find. I’ll read this section slowly, sitting with bite size segments, not reading it quickly but slowly and reading it multiple times and in multiple translations. It’s my hope to not only read it but to be read by it and to have these three chapters mark me so deeply that I will live them out more than I ever have before in my life. Imagine: a year in the Sermon on the Mount. You may not recognize me at all this time next year!

I want to continue my study of Celtic Christianity as I’ve found such an anchor and hope in this stream of living and being. I hope to visit some of the places and people who are paving the way for me in this arena. I’m fascinated by Celtic writers, thinkers and pilgrims and I want to follow my own curiosity.

Vocational Health

By vocation, I do not mean here, doing more work or better work or anything having to do with legacy. I mean pursuing this question: How can I best serve people given my gifts, ability and limitations?

William Stafford brilliantly asked this question: “Ask me whether what I have done is my life?”

Answer this question and we will all be put on a grand pilgrimage of curiosity and discovery. For many of us, the life we are presently living is NOT the life we intended or wanted to live at all. Since, we only have one life, and this life we have been given is not slowing down for us to catch up with it, we best be about the work of choosing to live out our one and only life right now and right here.

I’ve worked hard to take the off-ramp of my work. It’s taking me years to exit a life of publishing books, speaking and training people. The life for me now is not about any of that anymore. But, something in me still wants to reach inside my chest and monitor my own heartbeat—what am I feeling about what is happening in this frigale world; What is my heart beating for? Who is my heart beating for? Why am I so bothered by voices who are trying so hard to be influencers peddle their spiritual trinkets? I want to remain curious about this and my own spiritual curiosity only grows and doesn’t diminish. My writing and especially now on Substack is where I can simply reflect and then share my reflections with any one who might be interested.

My vocation as an aging man is now about letting go and being the man I have written about—becoming the soul I have spoken about—living the life that I have described in books, seminars, podcasts and now on Substack. I’ve settled the question that has been so often posed to me: “Steve, how can you exit now, when this message is most needed?”

It is never selfish to care for one’s own soul. Never!

In short this means to become more contemplative; more curious and more confessional. Each one of these words is a path I sit with daily and want to lean into more and more as I move through this next decade of my life. It is through confession—through sharing our own stories that we find a bond to remind us that we are humans, not AI machines. Our humanity links us and in our humanity, we find our dignity and value.

Perhaps, I can say it best this way, my true vocation is to help people keep their humanity intact, while being on a spiritual pilgrimage to our true home. Yes, that’s pretty close to the jugular vein of my heart. I think that’s the best I can say it for now.

This next year, I want to help people keep their humanity intact while being on a spiritual pilgrimage to our true home. Whose with me? You are my tribe is you are nodding yes or whispering, “Me.” May our Tribe increase.

Here’s the challenge—before New Year’s Eve, or over New Year’s Day, sit with what might become your word—your one word to focus you, motivate you and help you eat the elephant of a daunting New Year—one WORD at a time!

Happy New Year!

Every blessing!

Steve

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Here are some unique opportunities to do the kind of inner work I’m describing. Look them over and choose one that might best fit your needs.

1. Consider downloading your copy of The Great Annual Examen. This is a guided exercise, based on the wonderful work of Ignatius of Loyola to reflect back in order to move forward. You can download your own copy or consider getting the version where you can make multiple copies for your family, church or organization with granted permission. Here’s the Link to Review Your Options.

Join Peter Ivey and myself as we are offering a live, 2 hour online retreat on Zoom on January 6, 2025 at Noon EST where a limited number of folks (50) can join us for a guided and reflective time to consider the New Year using poems and the Great Annual Examen. We’re calling it a “New Beginnings Retreat.” When you register, you’re provided with a copy of the Great Annual Examen in your fee. Start now to do a section a day or plan a time when you cna have uninterrupted time to complete the Examen. Doing this kind of work is enhanced by a community like this where sparks ignite other sparks and the flame is brighter together. Here’s the link to consider the January 6 OnLine retreat. This will also be recorded and available if you’re unable to attend or for future reference. We will use the poetry of John O’Donohue, Thomas Merton, Stephen W. Smith and Peter M. Ivey.

3. Download the tool that Peter Ivey and I developed called “The State of My Sou Wheel.” It’s available for individual or group use with a lisence to print as many copies as you need for a church or organization or counseling practice. You’ll work through the five areas that I have described above for yourself; determine your own health and be given insight as to how you’re “really” doing in each of the five areas of your soul. Here’s the link for individual use.

Here’s the link for unlimite use of the State of My Soul Tool:

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