What are your goals? Where do you see yourself in a year….five years….ten years? Do you have goals? How do you plan to reach them? What’s important to you? What do you want to achieve? What do you want to do with your life? These are all questions I have asked myself over the years, and my answers have been, well, nebulous at best. My path to my goals have usually been winding and haphazard. For example, when I was in high school I knew I wanted to go to college (mostly because my mother was pretty insistent about it, so I assumed that was the thing to do), but I had absolutely no idea what I wanted to “be”. Once I got to college, I realized that all I really wanted was to be a wife and mother. Nobody informed me that you can have more than one goal (and I’ve always been rather single-minded…not much of a multitasker).

When I reached my goal of being a homemaker, wife and mother, I was happy with those roles, but still felt like something was missing. As my time was filled with all the tasks that go along with that life, I didn’t have much time left over for ”art” (and didn’t realize yet that creating was that important to me…that came later). Oh, I “feathered my nest”, made costumes, decorated cakes, made stuff for Bible classes. I found ways to be creative, but I also wasted LOTS of time with with all kinds of time-sucks. One of my few real regrets in this life is how much time I’ve wasted….I mean thousands of hours doing NOTHING worth anything. Sigh….anyway.

I feel that I have mostly stumbled my way through my life, having worthwhile goals in mind, but no clear-cut path to reach them, like raising my kids to be mature adults who love the Lord and strive to serve Him…I always prayed fervently that my children would grow up to be Christians in spite of me, because I knew I wasn’t perfect and had no idea if I was raising them “correctly” or not. Praise the Lord for hearing and answering those prayers!

All that stuff is a round-about way to say this. I want to change how I operate my life. I’m almost 53 years old, and I am going to make better use of my time. Oh, I know myself well enough to know that I will never be 100% efficient, I can’t completely change who I am. But I can develop new habits and be more productive. I  can find a way to stop wasting so much time. Next, I’ll tell you all about what I plan to accomplish in 2012….it’s quite a list….and how I plan to get there!