Hope smiles from the threshold of the year to come*
by chuckofish
The blogosphere, as you can imagine, is all about new year’s resolutions right now. Lists of resolutions: lose weight, quit smoking, save money, get fit, drink less, manage stress. You get the picture. Well, no thanks. January, I will admit, is a good month to get one’s closets in order, to edit one’s stuff, to clean house. But so is every month. You gotta keep up with these things or you can be buried alive.
That goes for a lot of things.
When it comes to New Years Resolutions, we can do better. I suggest we read the Resolutions of Jonathan Edwards– all 70 of them.
According to the Jonathan Edwards Center at Yale, the Resolutions were Edwards’ guidelines for self-examination. Puritans set great store by biblical injunctions to submit themselves to divine searching and to monitor their motives and actions. On a community level, congregations were exhorted to practice introspection as a duty of great consequence.
Edwards lays out the Resolutions in a matter-of-fact style, treating them much like scientific principles. Of the seventy resolutions, the first one dated, No. 35, was written on December 18, 1722, when the Diary begins. The last, No. 70, was composed on August 17, 1723.
Let’s resolve to be more self-examining. We can do better.
“There are always two sides to every story, and it is generally wise, and safe, and charitable, to take the best; and yet there is probably no one way in which persons are so liable to be wrong, as in presuming the worst is true, and in forming and expressing their judgement of others, and of their actions, without waiting till all the truth is known.”
― Jonathan Edwards, Charity & Its Fruits
*Alfred Tennyson
dual personalities 