Resolutions

I've never been into New Year's resolutions. It seems pointless to me to wait for a calendar turn to make changes if I feel they're necessary or valuable. And I generally think I can make those kind of lifestyle changes, it's been done before (like, say, when it comes to diet). As I say all this here I am writing about a post about resolutions. But I can explain.

As with many aspects of my life I'm going to credit my wife. For 2025 she bought, and successfully completed, a special Bible purposefully made to be read in one year. It's well designed, I was impressed, and I've decided to copy her. For 2026 I'm going to read the One Year Bible. You open it up and it says January 1st, and has a chunk of the Old Testament, starting at the beginning with Genesis, a (smaller) chunk of the New Testament, starting with Matthew, and smaller segments of Psalms and Proverbs. There's similar sized readings every day for the entire year and as you go you concurrently read the history of the Jews with the story of Jesus and the early church along with a sliver of songs and wisdom. This way you don't get bogged down just trying to tackle, for example, the at times mystifying breakdown of the first peoples, or the rules of Leviticus, or the lists of armies and genealogies. You instead get a mixture of parts of the Bible each day in reasonably sized bites and it helps. There are some, uh, strange transitions, however, like last night when I went from reading about Lot's daughters (I'll let you look this up if you don't know) to part of Jesus's sermon on the mount (about storing treasures in heaven and not worrying).

The main reason I'm striking forward with this reading plan is, well simply, it's been far too long since I've regularly read the Bible on my own accord and it's high time I do that. And unless I make some sort of commitment I probably won't follow through, I know myself. But with this version I can't let myself fall behind and with writing this post I've made my intentions public, for whoever wants to read. Now I'm stuck.

That's one resolution and if doing one I thought I might as well make it two. The second is an intention to spend considerably less time on social media this year. Since 2011 I've been glued to Twitter (yes I still call it that, or X, whatever) for all things news and sports. It's not particularly healthy for me to do this, or good for me to be looking at my phone all the time especially when I'm with my kids. The simple solution, and what I'm sticking with for now, is that I've deleted the Twitter app from my phone. I can still look at it on my computer in short bits each day, like when I'm having breakfast, but I don't need to be plugged in 24/7.

Combined I hope this leads to an improvement in my mental health and outlook on life, though to be honest I don't know how it couldn't. The more I can keep my mind on finding direction and hope in God's Word instead of the gutter of social media and all the fallenness of this world, the better. I'm thinking this could even lead to an improvement in my physical health as well, as first of all mental and physical health are certainly linked. But more than that I've noticed that I really feel like my brain gets garbled from scrolling, constantly having to move from one disparate piece of information or viewpoint to another, over and over and over again. I don't know for sure that doing this is rotting my brain and destroying my memory, but it wouldn't surprise me at this point. We'll just have to see how I feel in a year I guess.

So that's my plan for 2026. Nothing too crazy but solid steps toward focusing my life on what's most important. I did have other ideas, like drinking less, I'm doing a (mostly) Dry January, and overall taking better care of myself, but I don't think I'm going to formalize anything else. There will probably be a sleep tracking ring in my near future though, I just need to pull the trigger.

Are you doing any resolutions for the New Year? I'd love to hear about them.