In With the New

Before Facebook, there was Livejournal- an online journal that you could share with your friends. I still go on there to catch up on a few people, but I haven't posted on it since 2009. Something prompted me to look back at my entries, and Wednesday, on the first day of 2014, I found this entry from January 2nd, 2008:

Prompt: What is your biggest dream? How do you plan to achieve it?

"My biggest dream is to live a satisfying, fulfilling life. Here are the things that would involve: Building and living in our house in Goshen. Creating a family together, and raising our family in the hilltowns. Having my relationship with Steve only grow stronger by the day. Having a satisfying career that I would look forward to getting up and going to every morning. Looking back at my life at age __ and saying, 'Things have been pretty good.'

We're looking into house building this spring, we both want to have kids when we're young so we'll probably get on that sometime in the not so distant future, and I'm on my way to knowing exactly what I want out of my dream job. I'm feeling very optimistic with the start of 2008!"

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Back then we didn't know my dad was going to sell us the family homestead, so we were planning on building on a small piece of land I had inherited from my grandma. I also seemed quite certain that I would be a working mom! Not too surprising that I thought this- after all, my mom had been one- but when we realized my income would pretty much be the cost of daycare, we knew it didn't make any sense for me to continue my job.

Reading this makes me really happy with how far I've gotten with my goals and dreams in the past six years. We have been blessed, and I thank God for what we have. As the quote goes: "Dear God, thanks for this beautiful life and please forgive me if I don't love it enough".

Each and every day is a blessing.

In 2013 I became more present than I've ever been. I started looking for God and found Him everywhere. These are some of the things I want to continue to do in 2014. What will this year bring? Hopefully the kind of joys, excitement and fun last year brought. Probably some heartache too, because years have a habit of bringing both the very good and the very bad.

A new year. Another chance to do things a little better. Another chance to recommit to things that matter: Family, Faith, Friends, Fitness. A chance to maybe finally kick a really bad habit to the curb (nail biting). A chance to reach again for things I didn't dream possible.

Happy New Year, everyone! Let's make it amazing.