I have never been one to get all aflutter over a new year, it has always been just another day to me. It seems customary for people to have new years resolutions and honestly I have not made any. Since my last post I have been in an odd state of uncertainty and pondering vague floating ideas. Perhaps it is part of the process I discovered in the last post, at this point I don’t know.
Let me talk a bit about what has been floating around and perhaps a resolution list will come of it.
1. New Career
I cannot get out of my current career fast enough, at this time it is a necessary “evil”. Given the job market and current alternatives I am very thankful that I have my job and can pay my bills and provide for my family. However, I do not believe it is my final resting place. I got into this industry roughly 10 years ago because I thought that’s where the money was. That no longer is a primary motivating factor for me so the draw to it has waned.
For 10 years I have watched the rapid acceleration of technology and the pushed adoption of new trinkets and toys and software and features and upgrades and required retraining and I am quite honestly nearly becoming a Luddite because of it all. I definitely think there are benefits to technology and there are a place for them but the frenzied pursuit of leisure and entertainment and placing ten thousand light speed options at your fingertips for doing so I believe is detrimental. We are quickly becoming the fat people that float around with screens plastered to their faces in the movie Wall-E.
I have pondered what I should try to get into and what the timing and feasibility is. Recently the thought occurred to me that I might try to get into solar installation with an eye toward contracting. I figured if I am planning on living on it myself why not save money by installing and maintaining my own. If I believe in the independence it provides and plan to share that aspect of our lives with others, why not be able to help them achieve it themselves.
There’s another side that has been driving me. If we as Christians are to exercise dominion while we are here then in many ways we are doing a poor job. Environmental issues have been taken over by the greenies that worship the Earth. We’re getting whipped in the stewardship category. The only motivations you hear for making this shift are greenie reasons like being one with the Earth and anthropocentric global warming and so on. Not one voice for Christian stewardship, not one word for Christian independence from the world. That is unfortunate.
I believe this whole sphere of human interaction and marketplace ideals needs to be recovered by the Christian mind. Personally I have exercised a disengaging aversion to this field due to what I believe now were largely political reasons. Too often environmental stewardship and self sufficient and frugal living ideals and concern for Creation have been liberal ideals, and I’m no liberal. What would happen if my friends heard that I was championing “liberal issues”. Oh my, curse the day. That is precisely where we have failed. God created the heavens and earth and all that is in it, which means there is no realm in this existence that is not His. There is nothing that is not bound to and founded in His truth. We should not allow the truth of God’s dominion to be subverted by political worldviews.
With that mindset I have considered venturing vocationally into the field of sustainable living and sustainable energy, to set up an outpost in enemy territory if you will, and try to start taking back this sphere of ideas for the Lord.
The big question is where to start. I think that is where I am stuck at the moment.
2. Websites
Partly related to the topic above I have been toying with the idea of a couple of websites. One is for all things nature, the other frugality, the other for our “farm”. One or more of these will be integral to disseminating our ideas and motivations.
3. Home
My wife and I are both at a point where we are just tired of all the junk and orgy of toys and things and books and plastic containers and papers and the thousand other nick nacks that have invaded our home. We are in a throw away mood.
This is good in that it seems to be the manifestation of a paradigm shift. The problem we are having right now is a shortage of time and being overwhelmed. A common thread in our house is where do we start? We have spent 5 or so years accumulating and hoarding and grasping and acquiring that it can seem daunting to try and undo it.
4. Organization
This is a top to bottom thing. As you can tell by some other posts it has not been a physical or intellectual practice that has experienced much regularity. It is highly frustrating. I am the type that likes to fit things into a routine or consistent unattended process, and to have uncertainties or unforeseen changes or surprises occur is nothing less than a festering aggravation for me. I think I am very mechanical, almost exhibiting assembly line tendencies in some facets of my life. I want to look at the problem, twist and turn a few dials, let the machine go, and move on to something else.
Unfortunately life does not always work that way, and planning and good intentions do not equal autonomous implementation, no matter how bad I want it to. Neither does staring at collections of things shaking my head.
5. Focus
There is just so much to do and it is all at a starting point, it is all vast and daunting.
6. Faith
I have really been wrestling with this one and I imagine my wife has too although she would be the last to say it. I do not mean in any way that it is a wrestling of belief vs. unbelief, by no means. I mean wrestling with what we believe, with what we see as a reality in the church and in ourselves. I will not lie, I have dealt with great frustrations with the reality of my own faith and how I live, and how I hear it should be.
Honestly I think we both have wrestled with where we attend church. Personally it is becoming a larger issue for me as time goes by.
I am getting tired of intellectual laziness, puffery, and compromise. I have sat in bible studies where you hear wild off topic musings and a melting pot of doctrines and personal opinions with no association to scripture. The people partaking in the studies can often be made to say or believe anything you want them to believe so long as it is in a study guide. There is also the despicable practice of running from one paltry study to another, forget application, let’s just check studies off our list and talk about how convicted we were by it. It’s a shame. There is no growth in this, at least no good growth.
Never do you see a determined focus on fundamentals, study methods, scripture memorization, or doctrine. It is all inch deep ear tickling with no accountability and implementation. Personally I cannot deal with it anymore, I need meat.
I will say on the positive side that the more I research Calvinism and the Reformed faith the more I am drawn to it. What it systematizes from Scripture tracks more closely with what I have witnessed to be reality in my own life, particularly total depravity. Arminianism and semi-Pelagianism fall flat on their faces here with me.
I am afraid that the topical content division, if there even is one, in many churches today tends towards leading believers down a self-centered road with self-improvement being the pinnacle. There is 95% of how God loves you no matter what and is waiting on you and just wants you to turn to Him and can forgive you of everything, and then there’s 5% of God hated Esau. It is definitely an unhealthy balance that reaps what it sows, Christians that are so focused on themselves and how much God forgives and loves them and never on what God demands. The result is we become self-absorbed and self-pitying spiritual consumers obsessed with our own spiritual “struggles” (excused disobedience) but it’s okay because God is just waiting on us and just waiting to forgive us of everything we do, no matter what.
There may be a change of venue this year, we shall see.
7. Time and Priorities
Good old time. Never enough of it. There is so much to do and so much impatience. It is frustrating, as I quoted Sue Jamison before and I paraphrase now, I wish we could just get there. Let me try to analogize it.
Think of when you were a kid and were together with friends and they decided on engaging in some mischief that you knew was wrong. At that point your philosophies or ideals forked and went in different directions. You knew that if you stayed with those friends who were going to walk down this forked path that it would go against what you believed or wanted and that it may not bode well for you. Hopefully at this point you extracted yourself from the group and went your way.
Your new mindset did not coincide or agree with the proposed direction or beliefs of the group and the best remedy was separation.
This is where I am now and it causes uneasiness to have to sit in it. There are so many things to do and so little time to do them and there are so many sources of distraction. I have found the day to day rat race along with the amenities of leisure to be a huge disruptor to my focus and intentions.
Venturing daily into a thoroughly worldly workplace and marketplace with its vulgarities and corruptions and temptations is extremely taxing and often only leaves enough energy at the end of the day for venting and decompression, plus getting the family and ourselves ready for the next day.
I will need to figure out how to manage this while leaving family time and some leisure in there as well. Hey, maybe we turn off the stupid TV more often.
So perhaps there we have it. I would say it all could fall under the categories of:
Faith
Home
Vocation
Pretty standard I would say. It does make me tired thinking about it though. Maybe I should add a nap in there.
Pondering it a little more I think I can come up with five areas of focus for this year:
1. Reduce
Reduce clutter, possessions, debt, dependence. Get rid of unnecessary accumulated things. Pay down our debt load in order to reduce our income needs and expand our vocational options. Reduce our dependence on grocery stores for food. Reduce or eliminate luxuries and services that are not essential (maybe that’s next year).
2. Produce
Get on the road to really producing food this year. Just focus on producing it, not necessarily canning or preserving it or selling it or anything like that. Just produce it. The more we grow the less we buy. Refocus our diets to subsist as much as possible on what we grow. Get away from junk food and processed food.
3. Vocation
Make headway on training for the new vocation. Don’t be a perpetual planner or dreamer, get it done. Make one thing the focus this year, maybe solar installation training. Have my wife get her business administration and entrepreneurial mind in gear for the contracting side. Focus on getting trained.
4. Faith
Tighten up, find a doctrine, find a home. Learn to study the Bible, get rid of the fluffy checkout line Christian books and be serious in my study. Find a home that preaches and practices what I believe to be true. Be patient, be deliberate, be constant.
5. Mindset
Vanquish our consumer mindset and become savers and producers. Find ways to skip the money step. Become a couple with a focus on the future, on freedom and independence.
Perfect, I guess those are our resolutions. 
Happy New Year to all of you!
