The Truth About New Year Resolutions

I was lying in bed the other night. You know the kind of lying there where your body is still, but your mind is doing laps.

Everywhere you look right now, someone is asking the same question:

What’s your New Year’s resolution?

What are your goals for this year?

What are you going after?

And I realized something quiet unsettling.

I don’t actually want a goal.

I want a feeling.

I’ve known this for a while, even if I didn’t have words for it yet. For at least the past year, maybe longer, there’s been this vision that keeps returning to me.

Not a checklist.

Not a five-step plan.

A feeling.

I want to feel fully in God.

Full of God.

Held, rooted, light.

And the only way my brain knows how to describe that is embarrassingly simple and oddly specific: me with a bow in my hair, in a pretty little sundress, frolicking through a daisy field.

That’s it.

That’s the image.

And no, I don’t know how to turn that into a SMART goal.

That’s where I felt stuck.

Because I’m wired like so many of us. I want something tangible to chase. Something measurable. Something I can point to and say, “See? Progress.”

Lose the weight.

Get the finances in order.

Eat better.

Drink more water.

Have more date nights.

Work out consistently.

We’ve been trained to think this way.

Society has taught us that growth looks like goals you can quantify. And every January, we dust off the same categories and try again.

Health.

Finances.

Marriage.

Productivity.

But here’s the thing no one really wants to admit.

If we were going to stick to those goals, we would have by now.

Most of us don’t fail because we’re lazy or unmotivated.

We fail because the goals are surface-level.

“My goal is to get my finances in order.”

Okay… what does that actually mean?

How does that feel in your body?

Who are you becoming as a result?

“My goal is to lose weight.”

Why? To feel confident? Free? At home in yourself again?

We keep starting with the action instead of the longing underneath it.

And then we beat ourselves up when, by the end of January, we’ve already forgotten what the goal even was.

What if the problem isn’t discipline?

What if the problem is direction?

What if instead of working toward a goal, we worked from a feeling?

What if we started with the question:

“How do I want to feel in my life?”

Not just this year, but when I look back on it someday.

Peaceful.

Rooted.

Alive.

Connected.

Held.

Present.

Whole.

And then we worked backwards.

If I want to feel fully in God, what kinds of rhythms support that?

If I want to feel light and free in my body, what kind of care feels nourishing instead of punishing?

If I want my marriage to feel safe and warm, what small, human practices create that environment?

This isn’t about setting fewer goals.

It’s about setting truer ones.

When we start from the feeling and the vision, the actions become personal. They stop feeling like punishment or obligation. They become expressions of alignment.

And here’s the part that feels like grace to me.

If I set twenty intentions this year and only five truly take root, I don’t have to beat myself up. Because the measure of success was never completion. It was movement.

Am I closer to the way I want to feel?

Am I more myself?

Am I more at home in God, in my body, in my life?

That changes everything.

I think this is why so many of us feel exhausted by self-improvement culture. We’re tired of chasing outcomes that don’t actually touch the deeper ache.

But when you name the ache first, the rest begins to arrange itself around it.

This year, I’m not chasing resolutions or goals.

I’m tending a feeling.

And I have a hunch that when we do that, we stick around long enough to see real change happen.

Until next time may your home be whole, your heart be light and your faith be fierce.

XX, Makaila