By Susan Shanklin

I don’t know about you, but I’m not too keen on what they call New Year’s resolutions. Oh, I guess when I was younger and watching Dick Clark on black and white TV, I thought of silly little things that didn’t last until the next day.

Now, it occurs to me: why wait until the end of the year to change or correct a bad habit? I’m not too sure how the idea of New Year’s resolutions came about. I’m too busy to waste my time on Google to find the answer.

I was thinking, though, I just might try it this year, but not waiting until the clock strikes twelve. Why not start today reading more in the Word? Why not start thinking more highly of my fellow neighbor with a junky yard? Why not start today praying more for people I don’t agree with?

Today is a better start than tomorrow for anything. I don’t want to plan for failure, so I think I will start today.

By the way, if the truth be known, I am a great procrastinator. Oh, yes, my friend, I am a busy, hard-working woman for sure, but sometimes getting busy and hard-working takes a while.

Can you imagine God procrastinating in making the world? It could have taken Him a month or more. When God made woman, He could have procrastinated and left Adam to flounder around in the garden tripping over tree roots and wondering where his next meal was coming from. It’s good that God was quick in making that woman, or else mankind would have been in a mess, even without the devil. Just saying.

I myself have been a great doer of projects in my mind for a long time. For example, I want to and have to remove a residue from my wood stairs before I can restain and shellac them. Well, I have been at this project for a year now. I have tried many products and methods. I go in spurts. But after a complete failure, I lose my momentum and think about the “new” way. 

Now, I am down to my last two options, just totally sand the stairs or use denatured alcohol. Both are a mess, and the last is unhealthy. So, I have been pondering the two methods for quite a while now. I say to myself when Tom goes on his next trip, and THEN I will start. Well, it’s been only short trips lately, so that was my excuse. 

Now, the unhealthy solution makes me wonder if I might pass out while no one is home and roll down the stairs. I’ll be lying there saying, “Help, I’ve fallen, and I can’t get up.”

Even just writing this makes me sigh, but I know it needs to get done, and no one but me is going to do it.

Surely, if I patched and painted the front porch, painted the stairwell and all upstairs, stained the front yard fence, painted the front door, moved cement planters around my yard, removed grey railroad track rock in front for plants, and so on, I can do this stair project. Right?

Are you with me? Do you feel my pain?

I hear some yeses and some noes. 

Just suck it up, Susan, and do your stairs! But … tomorrow.

Have an unexpectedly blessed, new, fresh, healthy, renewed coming year. Make it count for the Kingdom and your family.

Have Tom come to your church for a week, and I’ll tell you how I did my stairs!

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