It struck me this afternoon that I’ve been writing this blog for a year. (Thanks for reading!) I started last fall. As I’ve written before, I have always seen September as the beginning of my year—it stems from the normal life of working in a school. So, while I’m getting my haircut and buying my “back-to-school clothes,” I think of my “new year resolutions”: This year I’ll say a weekly Rosary (that goes out the window around the third week of September). This year I’ll jog (that lasts until about Labor Day). It can be easy for us to beat ourselves up about not reaching personal goals—and we should realize that personal growth is often a journey and not a destination—but that’s hard and maybe goals should be hard. Certainly as hard as Jesus’ message to us in this weekend’s Gospel.
“If anyone comes to me without hating his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple,” Jesus says. Ugh. Like most of Jesus’ sayings, this is packed with meaning, but on some level I think it is a really easy and needed observation. Jesus continues, “Which of you wishing to construct a tower does not first sit down and calculate the cost to see if there is enough for its completion?” I guess through my prayer, at the beginning of my year, I hear my Lord saying You need to make real goals, not meaningless abstract ones. Of course, I’m breaking them so easily! I don’t have any skin in the game! If I set real goals for myself, they will have consequences, and some of those consequences might be difficult, but they would mean I made a real choice—the choice to follow Christ.
I realize at the beginning of this academic year with so many new faces that I’m getting to be one of the older ones. I realize that the new platoon of parents with young children are now my age, and just then, I find myself suddenly and quite unexpectedly grown up. This is my ninth year at OLMC. With the help of our Lord and with today’s tough challenge, I hope to have the “resources to finish” so I can once again, more than ever, better than ever, start again. Happy “new-ish” year!
I’ll be seeing you,
Elliot