How to stick to new year’s resolutions

I love hymn number 644 in the Celebration Hymnal for Everyone, Davids Psalm 96: Sing a new song unto the Lord; let your song be sung from mountains high. Sing a new song unto the Lord, singing alleluia.

Revellers greet the arrival of 2014. In her column, Judith Turner writes that making new years resolutions is an act of faith. (Photo: Carlo Allegri, Reuters/CNS)

I cannot sing this hymn without acknowledging that every day we need to make a new start. Every time I sing this hymn, I feel almost as though Im getting an instruction or a command to make things new in my life. To change my tune. To re-write my narrative.

The hymn strikes a chord deep inside of me, a place where I know I can be a new creation again.

The beginning of a new year is traditionally the time to make known, privately or publicly, what we would like to make new. And perfectly so, because the beginning of a new year is an opportunity to break some old habits and create new ones.

The new habits will, hopefully, take us to a heightened experience of daily living.

Most of us have a deep desire, year in and year out, to become better people: to become better at what we do, grow our business, deepen our relationship with Christ and other significant relationships, become more involved in community life, improve our qualifications, and so on.

Why do we have this deep longing even after proving year after year that we do not always live up to achieving our deepest desires for newness? With our history of making and breaking new years resolutions, why do we still continue to make them?

With all the good intentions we have for the new year, our old habits unconsciously creep in while we are off guard and we then fall back into old ways  it is hard work to start and maintain new habits, and yet, ultimately this is the work we need to do to be able to experience a new, happy and meaningful life.

Many people would argue that it is better to not make new years resolutions because these resolutions last only for a short while.

The point is that it is an act of faith to make new years resolutions. We have to place our faith, our hope and our trust in God that whatever we plan to achieve we have to depend on him to carry us through.

Father Ron Rolheiser OMI advises: To make new resolutions is to express faith in the God of the resurrection. To try for new life, for a fresh start, precisely when bad habits have kept me so long in a certain helplessness, is to say: I believe in the resurrection and the life! Somewhere, deep inside of us, in that place where we want to make new years resolutions, we still carry that faith. In that place we still say the creed and still believe in the resurrection. Because of that belief, because of new years resolutions, God can still make something out of nothing!

We ultimately realise that we cannot do anything by ourselves and that any resolution that is based on our own interest and importance and which we want to implement with our own efforts alone, will never stand the test of time.

I hope you made your new years resolutions in good faith and very realistically based on what you know you will be able to muster.

For example, if you would like to become better at parenting, then research where you could attend a parenting skills course, look out for other parent support groups, get yourself a copy of a parents prayer and pray this prayer regularly. Bring your resolution to become a better parent before God during Holy Mass and offer up all your efforts at better parenting and ask for the grace to continue.

A popular resolution is to live a healthier life. We want to lose weight, exercise more or take steps towards preventing or controlling a chronic condition like high blood pressure. This year, take control by breaking the habits that lead to bad health. Understand your health condition. Take signs of bad health seriously and act on them swiftly. Your body is the temple of God. Ask him to help you take care of his temple.

God, who sees and knows all things, will help us with our resolutions and through his grace we will be able to sing a new song unto the Lord; let your song be sung from mountains high. Sing a new song unto the Lord, singing alleluia.