The 11-Month Solution

Me, being of sound mind and body (except for the one bad knee), solemnly resolve to not go to the Gym in January!

Now that’s a doable New Year’s Resolution. This one has success written all over it. How am I doing thus far? Excellent. I haven’t even slowed down when driving by my Gym. While everyone else is dropping like a rock I’m riding the wave of resolutional success. How am I doing it? How am I so strong? Fortitude, uber-commitment and an intense case of claustrophobia. There are so many people in my Gym in January it’s hard to breathe. By mid-February, half of the January crowd will be long gone and then it’ll be safe to go back. Yes, it’s an amazing plan. Thank you for noticing!

The Internet states (and it has to be true if it’s on the Internet!) that between 80% and 90% of all New Year’s Resolutions fail within four weeks. Four weeks. One month. Do the math and you’ll see the grim reality of a 7%-8% success rate for the remaining 48 weeks. So, let’s fix this bog-of-failure by tossing out January. What? You heard me. January is out.

I, being totally out of the box and veering off the reservation of conventional thinking, do hereby grant you permission, even encourage you, to erase January from any and all of your previously stated New Year’s Resolutions, and to thereby have a do-over beginning February 1.

Feel better? Feel more successful already? Great, but there is a catch: Grace must naturally be followed by an altered life. Erasing January is an example of grace. It’s a do-over. Another name for this would be a fresh start. Grace must lead to an amazing feeling of thankfulness. True thankfulness must lead to a different approach to life, people or in the case of Christians, God. Try to imagine the eleven full months remaining in 2013 as a time to live out your thankfulness to God for His Amazing Grace.

I believe 80%-90% of resolutions could succeed if they were, for the lack of a better word, baptized. So let’s do just that. Let’s spiritualize and effectively baptize our hopes and goals for personal improvement; and, see February-December as the most amazing months in our existence. You know, we might be on to something here!

Michael McCullar