NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTION AND THE RUBIK CUBE SERIES

By Andrea Guachalla

We are approaching the last days of the year, and I bet you completely forgot about your New Year’s Resolutions, didn’t you? And if you didn’t, they probably were unachievable with all the craziness of this year. 2020. The year we’ll never forget.

As you probably did, I also set my New Year’s Resolution at the beginning of this year, and I divided mine into 6 areas: Spiritual, Intellectual, Emotional, Financial, Artistic, and Health. I had goals, and practical steps to take for each area, and they were all focused on developing good habits that would allow me to use my God-given time, gifts, and resources more wisely. I draw all of this in a chart that is still hanging in my room.

The chart worked well for the first couple of months of 2020, of course. Previously in 2019, it had worked pretty well too, so seeing how that simple process of setting goals and practical steps at the beginning of the year helped me focus on my relationship with Christ, and how that lead me to be more productive and mindful in work, relationships, family, etc., I decided to write about it here on Tasting The Ocean. Since the chart includes 6 areas, I made an analogy with how a Rubik’s Cube is solved, and that’s how the “Rubik’s Cube Series” started.

Now, the series was supposed to have nine articles, but only four were published, and if you have been following the content of this blog you might wonder what happened. Here I will explain the process of publishing those first articles, why the series was discontinued, and how my (and probably yours) New Year’s Resolutions of 2021 will look utterly different from the ones of 2020. 

The first article of the series was published on May 12th, and it was titled, “Growing is like… A Rubik’s Cube.” In it, I explain how solving a Rubik’s Cube goes about, and I compare it to how man gets to grow spiritually and personally. The article addresses perseverance, endurance, and also setting priorities. 

After it, two articles were published as part of the series, expanding on the grounds we should have when we think about productivity, focusing on the fact that we are sinful, and we tend to use our time unwisely, this is addressed in the article “Procrastinators in Coronaland” that came out on June 9th, and later on, on June 15th a follow-up article titled “The Lord of Time” was published, that talks about who the real owner of our time is: God, and how we are only trapped in this fourth dimension. 

After those articles, it seemed fitting to start exploring the first and most important area of our lives that is portrayed with the color blue in my New Year’s Resolutions chart: our spiritual life. The foundation for focusing on it was that before working on or setting any goals for the other areas, it was and is necessary to focus first on our relationship with the One True God, Who is revealed in the Bible, and Who ultimately owns our time, gifts, resources, and our very lives. This article was published on June 30th with the title “Insideout: blue”, and it was to be followed by 5 other articles. Except that… It wasn’t.

Now, at that point, by the end of June, and though I had planned to publish those five articles, they suddenly seemed useless. Not because the tips and grounds had no value, but because life seemed so changed, and many of the practical tips were so off to date in regards to the current pandemic situation. Most of the goals and steps that I had set for the “emotional area,” for example, included meeting up with friends, and church family several times a week, and inviting people over as well. No way of doing all of that! Not in Vienna, not anywhere! At least for most of the year.

And that, my friends, it’s the sad story of how the “Rubik’s Cube Series” started but never came to a completion, though it will continue at some point, most likely when I can figure out how my New Year’s Resolutions’ chart will look like considering that at any given moment a virus could be kindly exported from China, prompting us all to volunteer for house arrest, and then make us all stare at each other suspiciously in the bus. 

Now, in the face of all that has been going on, it makes sense that we would ask ourselves if it does even make sense to set a New Year’s Resolution for 2021. And I would say that yes, it makes sense! Of course, it does, even if our circumstances end up changing completely! But this time while we work on setting goals, and resolutions, we ought to remind ourselves one thing: 

“Come, now you who say “Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit”- yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. Instead, you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.”” 

James 4:13-15, ESV

While we are a nothing in the universe, God is the Creator of everything we know and beyond. We control nothing, and He controls all up to the smallest particle of the universe. We are only sinners in need of a savior, humans who can be shaken by a small virus, and be frightened by those who can kill the body, and He? He is the mighty, gracious God who sent His own Son to live, die, and be glorified for those who would believe in Him, He is the God who cannot be shaken, nor changed, ever Holy, and ever-loving.

What are we, mist and dust, that God would allow us to serve Him? Nothing. And yet by His grace, we have the privilege of serving Him, though always so imperfectly. And for that, despite all the harshnesses, and uncertainties, we can say “What a great God He is.” As we set goals and think of the new year that is coming let’s not focus on ourselves, but rather on getting to know Him and loving Him every single day.