Having a Plan.

This post is for Jim. A few days ago, I received an email from him that light-heartedly chastised me for not keeping my blog up to date. He even accused me of abandoning my blog in favor of facebook! I guess he knows what buttons to push - so here I am - up-dating my blog. I hope you're happy, bro. :)

Instead of giving an entirely boring and unnecesarily detailed account of the goings on in my life for the past few months, I'll just give some insights into what I seemed to be obsessed with as of late. Having a plan. I'm a planner. I go insane if I don't have a plan, and I feel completely flustered if my plans get debunked. I feel like January and Febuary of this year have had a few planning successes and a few planning fiascos. I'll illustrate with the success I'm proudest of, and the fiasco I'm still trying to un-fiasco.

• Success: New Years Goals - I prefer setting New Years goals over setting New Years resolutions. A resolution is too intimidating, too final, and too absolute. I feel that if I set resolutions that I have no room for weakness, and let's face it, there's always a day that we just can't - or don't - make it to the gym. Or a day where we give in to the cookie jar when we know we shouldn't. Or a day that we honestly forget to do whatever it was that we resolved to do just because life is busy and crazy. And then...here comes the guilt. "I've already broken my resolution and it's only January 5th!" We all have good intentions, and all of our resolutions are truely things that we'd like to accomplish in the upcoming year, but who says we have to be perfect at them immediately? A goal allows us time to work towards accomplishing that "good intention" in baby steps. Much less intimidating, and honestly, I believe it to be much more motivating. I've divided each of my goals for 2009 down into manageable steps, and hopefully by working one step at a time I can achieve those goals by December. I admit, I wasn't perfect in January, but no where in my goal plan did I designate perfection. I still have 10.5 months to revamp and retry. I have seen improvement in many of my goal areas, and it's rewarding to know that I'm on my way!
• Fiasco: Post-deployment plans - Being the planner that I am, I like to know where I will be, what I will be doing, how I will be doing it, and all the in-betweens at least a year in advance. I've schemed up at least 5 different scenarios of our lives "post-deployment" and we still haven't settled on one - probably because none of them are ideal. (The details are too much to cover in this post - maybe I'll save it for another and hope for some input.) The whole "not-knowing-what's-happening-past-May" thing is driving me nuts. I dwell on it all too much and nothing really seems to be falling into place. Hopefully when David comes home on leave we'll be able to work through the details, choose an option, pray about it, and hopefully get a lead as to what the Lord has in store for us.