New Year, Old Greg

I am really glad to see the start of 2008. The entire month of December a plague descended upon our house. From December 2- December 27, somebody in our family was sick or recovering from surgery. It was a long month, unlike any we had experienced as a family. I am glad we are done with that. I am praying, earnestly and desperately that we are done with that.

I am also glad to see 2008 because 2007 was simply a hard year. I couldn’t identify exactly what was hard about it for the longest time. All fall I was stuck with a lingering feeling that something was off, but I couldn’t figure out what it was. So much changed this year with the launch of a new worship service, my daughter going to school 5 days a week, plenty of staffing changes at church and a wedding seemingly every other weekend. When the fall hit I felt like I had gone to a new school or changed my class schedule so radically that I had no idea how to function. Sometimes I felt like I was 14 year old freshman Greg wandering around the halls of Eleanor Roosevelt high school trying to find his class and realizing he wasn’t even on the right floor let alone at the right end of the school.

But, even with all of that transpiring, there was something else that was really off. Then it clicked. What is off is me. Wait, you say, surely Greg hasn’t just discovered he is strange, unusual, complicated with simplicity and cookie cutter outside the box uniquely normal has he! No, what I discovered is that I spent a lot of 2007 not being myself. It hit me like Sister Theresa with the ruler across the knuckles that I was trying to be someone else a lot of the time. I had made the statement last January that my theme for 2007 was going to be Kickin’ it Up a Notch. Instead of turning it up to 11, however, I seemed to turn it down to about a 4 or 5. 

This begs the question, of course, as to why I would try to be someone else. After all who wouldn’t want to be me right? Well I guess the answer was me because I sure wasn’t being me. The main problem with that isn’t that the world can’t function without a me, it is that I am not good at being anybody else, while I play an excellent me. So I spent much of 2007 being totally ineffective because I tried to be who I thought other people needed me to be instead of who I am gifted and called to be. Duh! No wonder I was struggling so much.

Gretchen and I talked about this at length the other day and decided that 2008 should be the year of authenticity. Not in the sense that authenticity is a one year commitment or that it was absent from life before this, but in the sense that we both need to spend time understanding who we are and trying to live into who we are called to be.

So that is my challenge for 2008 and a call to all my peeps to help me keep it real. Growing up in PG County MD we had a little saying/chant we would yell out. It was really creative, “PG, keeping it real!” You had to kind of say it with some urban attitude for it to sound good. (Really it was intimidating, I promise) So I am going old school with my 2008 theme. This year I am keeping it real. In the process may God show me reality in a new way by changing the real me in ways only his sanctifying love ever could.