A Year of Goals on the Wall

There is a box of pushpins on the desk and he has been holding one of them between his fingers for a while now without pinning anything.

It is the first Monday of January, a little after two in the afternoon, and the snow that was supposed to be an inch is going to be more than an inch. He is in the back bedroom that has been the study since the boy moved out. Space heater going under the desk. A mug of tea on top of a commentary because there is no room on the desk itself.

Through the open door his daughter is at the kitchen table with earbuds in, doing something with a highlighter and a textbook, and every so often she says a word out loud to herself and he can hear it.

Behind the desk is the corkboard, and he has cleared it.

Twelve index cards are laid out in front of him in a row, one per month, and on each one, in his own block capitals, is a thing about his character. January: listen without preparing the answer. February: be unhurried with people who talk slowly. March: no sarcasm, none, not once. And on down the row to December.

He worked on those cards for two hours yesterday afternoon while the game was on in the other room, and they are good. They are honest, they are specific, and there is not a vain one among them. He is not trying to build a platform. He wants to be a different man than the one his family got last year.

Then he opened the wide drawer for the tape, and last January's cards were in there. Twelve of them. Rubber banded. In the same handwriting.

He went through them at the desk with the snow coming down, and eight of the twelve are word for word the same as the ones lying in front of him now. Not similar. The same. March said no sarcasm, none, not once. He had forgotten writing it, which is its own quiet piece of information.

So he is sitting here with a pushpin between two fingers and a year on the desk and last year in the drawer, and the honest question is not whether the goals are good, because they are. It is what exactly he thinks is going to be different about the pinning this time.

His daughter says something to herself in the kitchen. The heater clicks off and then on.

And you know that wall, though yours might be a note in your phone or a list you never wrote down. You have a picture of the person you would be a year from now, and you can hear how it sounds when you say it out loud, and you keep pinning it up anyway, because the wanting is real and there is nowhere else to put it.

Moses asked for days, not for a year

Let me start with what that man on the corkboard is actually doing, because I want to honor it before I take it down.

He is trying to become somebody by looking at the whole distance at once. Twelve months, twelve traits, laid end to end. And there is nothing corrupt in it. But look at what it does to a day: every single one of the three hundred and sixty five becomes a small piece of a year he has already scored in advance, which means an ordinary Tuesday can only ever come out as either on track or behind.

Now look at what Moses asks for in the middle of a psalm about how short a life is.

So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.Psalm 90:12

He does not ask to number his years. He could have. The whole psalm is about years, seventy of them, eighty by reason of strength, gone like a watch in the night. And out of all that he asks for days, plural but one at a time, and he asks to be taught it, which tells you it is not a skill a man picks up by being sensible.

And notice the second half, because it is the whole thing. The point of numbering the days is not efficiency. It is that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom. He is asking for a heart, in the size that a day comes in.

You have today, and you have it as a gift and not as an installment on something. Psalm 90:12 asks God to teach a man that, which means it is His to give rather than yours to master, and it is the Spirit of wisdom in Ephesians 1:17 who does the teaching in an actual person on an actual afternoon.

One degree is not a smaller goal

Now let me say the thing that keeps this from turning into a tidier plan, which is exactly what a man with a corkboard will do with it if I let him.

One degree today is not January's card broken into a smaller piece. It is not the year divided by three hundred and sixty five. That is still the year, only in a finer grind, and the man is still standing in front of the whole distance holding a ruler.

Think about how God fed a nation in a desert. He put out enough for a day. Not a week, not a quarter, and what got hoarded overnight bred worms and stank by morning, which is a very undignified way to teach people something and it worked. A day's portion, gathered in the morning, eaten, gone. And nobody ever went hungry in forty years of it.

You are given what today holds, and it is already enough for today. Lamentations 3:23 says His mercies are new every morning, in the morning quantity, and it is the same Spirit who supplies it fresh, so a portion is not a small version of a year.

Which changes the question. Not what am I supposed to have become by December. Just: what has He actually put in my hands this afternoon, in this house, with the snow coming down and a girl at the kitchen table forty feet away.

That question has an answer. Most days it is small and specific and it takes eleven minutes.

You are being changed today, in the day you are actually standing in, and you were being changed on every ordinary day you scored as a wash. 2 Corinthians 3:18 says the changing is from one degree of glory to another and puts the Lord who is the Spirit in charge of it, so it never once depended on the day matching a card.

The wall is heavier than it looks

I want to name something about that corkboard that the man behind the desk has not said to anybody.

A year of your own character pinned where you can see it is a year of evidence hung on a wall in front of a man who is already inclined to read himself hard. On the good weeks it is a promise. In February it is a wall of small verdicts, and he will still be standing under it in the dark at the end of a bad day.

So if the wanting has gotten heavy, if you are tired in your body and short with the people in the house and quietly certain you are the problem, get somebody into it with you. That is not the thing a man reaches for once he decides God has not shown up. It is one of the instruments God Himself uses, and He always has. A doctor, because January is hard on a body and a body writes half of what a man calls character. A counselor, who will not read twelve index cards as a moral report. One friend holding the whole picture. And if the snow and the quiet have taken you somewhere darker than disappointment, if you have caught yourself deciding the house would be lighter with you out of it, text 988 or call it before this afternoon is over, or a crisis line where you live, and get a human being close enough to sit in the chair beside that desk.

Galatians 6:2 tells believers to carry one another's burdens and calls that the fulfilling of the law of Christ, and the Spirit is named through that same letter as the one producing every bit of it: you are not the only one holding this, and you were not the only one holding it last January either.