Medley Minute with Fr Sam: What are New Year's resolutions? -The CAN BE good if you are realistic first about the evaluation of your life, and about actual steps you will truly make to improve it. -It is FAR BETTER to examine your life at the end of each day and adjust daily your real behavior based on actual experience, making resolutions that are one step, not ten, in the right direction. Catholics do this every time at Night Prayer, or Compline. -Being truly realistic and honest WITH yourself means you exercise a certain level of suspicion in your own capacity to keep promises. Are your resolutions measurable in time or resources? If not they are probably pie in the sky and pretty ideas with no teeth. Make reachable goals. Accomplish them. Set new ones. Daily. -Being honest ABOUT yourself means that you also avoid self-loathing, undue harsh self-criticism that isn't founded on the Love God has for you but the negative self perception that is born from the dark shadow of not yet accepting His undying love in all the cracks and corners of your misery. God is patient with you, why aren't you? -Thus resolutions of changed behavior are based on true Hope, neither on false presumption, nor on empty despair, but that the Love gives true hope for actual change for the better. -Real resolutions must needs be reflected in your relationships of those closest to you. The people around you that you see are the most immediate mirror of how you actually behave. Are they better off or do they have to recover from contact with you? Do rejoice them or do you embitter them? -They engender hope, joy, and enthusiasm for life lived fully alive and well.