What Will I Have Done This Year?

If all goes according to plan (and if there’s anything we learned from 2020, it’s that everything goes according to plan), this will be my first of 60 blogs this year: 48 here on my TMZ home base and 12 with Your Other Brothers.

Hold me to it, fam!

I fell off the blogging wagon in December. Part of it was laziness. Part of it was business. Part of it was mild forms of calamity.

I felt lethargic not going anywhere for Christmas this year. First Christmas of my life not spent in my Pennsylvanian homeland and with family. It was an apathy that flooded into New Year’s, not driving folks around on the biggest rideshare night of the year like I’d done the previous three years, thanks to my disease.

Watching the clock strike midnight from my apartment, alone, instead of making a few hundred bucks with strangers in my car? Weirrrrd.

It wasn’t just a void last month, though. I took a few weeks to invest into a smashing weekend of a YOB digital retreat. More than any other year since our 2015 inception, YOB’s followers and supporters have been such a blessing to me personally and to our community at large.

God is doing something in our midst. I sense it more than ever.

And lastly on my lack of blogging excuses list, my laptop decided to take a little break from, say, “working” — because 2020, of course.

But it’s a new year now. No more time for lethargy. No more holiday blues. No more computer bugs (fingers crossed on that one, anyway).

In short, it’s go-time! Boy, am I jazzed for this year. Aren’t we all after 2020?

In my year-ending newsletter (you can subscribe to my more personal monthly updates here!), I talked about new year’s resolutions and another way of looking at them — namely, by looking behind them.

Instead of saying, “What do I want to do this year?” try saying, “What will I have done this year?”

It’s a productivity tip I learned from Donald Miller, and I’ve never been more eager to implement this subtle mental tweak for 2021.

I’ve had a ton of anxiety building over the last year, more than ever, and I’ve started meditating each day. Something separate from prayer, which I also do.

This is conscious breath-work. A literal stopping to breathe. Enjoying silence. Following prompts from an app’s nice calming lady voice.

In today’s meditation (I usually do this midday after some morning work), Lady Voice challenged me to consider the difference between a resolution and an intention. To allow myself grace when I don’t fully check off those items on my ever-important to-do list.

I like grace. Grace is good.

But if I show myself too much grace, stuff don’t get done.

I want to find the middle ground between resolution and intention. To show myself grace, yes, but also to get work done, to take the time, and to implement the good stuff — the necessary stuff — into my days.

Some areas where I was severely lacking the good, necessary stuff in 2020? My spiritual health and my physical health.

I don’t know how I’m perceived spiritually, honestly; if it’s accurate or presumptuous or ridiculous of me to think that some see me as a spiritual superhero.

I’ll just dash those perceptions now and put it bluntly: I didn’t read Scripture for many months last year. Some occasional morning devotionals. Some digital church services. But no actual, substantive, consistent personal time with the Lord spent in Scripture all last year.

And honestly for the last few years.

So, what will I have done in 2021? Well, I’ll have read more Scripture. I’ll have read a lot more Scripture. I’ll have read the Psalms, Proverbs, and all four Gospels each month, all year long. Roughly nine chapters a day for three-hundred sixty-five days.

Oops. Did I really say that? Did I really put that out there? Is there no taking that back??

When I look back on 2021, what a legacy that will be. I can’t wait to check off that one come December 31st. I’m five days into this new Scripture-reading plan, and already my soul feels as if it had been starving, now getting re-nourished. It was; it is.

From King David to King Jesus, the human heart to the heart of God, I’m eager to dive into this long neglected well, again and again, all year long.

I have many other “resolutions-intentions,” too. Some serious ones like having run another half-marathon, and some less serious but still very much meaningful ones.

Like, I want to have learned how to do a handstand. I’ve just always wanted to do one.

Also, I want to have learned juggling. I do it metaphorically keeping the YOB blog, podcast, and Facebook group going, along with my own brand of content and books, so why not learn to literally juggle too?

I also want to have gotten regularly back into guitar as well as learn a new language (any guesses which one?).

As for online content, there was the aforementioned 60 blogs written this year, along with other ambitious numbers across my podcast, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok.

Yes — TikTok. I’ve been getting so into this app over the last month, you guys. Even got over 33,000 views on a spoilery Mandalorian video.

If y’all are on THE TOK, please follow me! It’s been such a fun outlet for my humor and creativity, but hopefully also for my serious side when it comes to issues of faith, sexuality, and masculinity. I weirdly sense huge things for TikTok this year.

As a single guy living alone the last couple years, it’s become blazingly apparent that I need more hobbies. Blogging once a week only cuts so much into my solitary downtime. It feels good to have mentally and emotionally stimulating stuff to do again with the dawn of a new year.

I’ve not used my time wisely for many months. 2020 was my toughest year yet, as I know it was for many others too. I’ve been down on myself with my health issues. I’ve been down on myself with others.

I want to resolve-intend for bigger things this year. To step out of my apartment castle more and more this year. With any luck, a new vaccine will be coursing through my veins soon, and I’ll feel a new relief and confidence to get out again. Both locally and abroad.

I haven’t gotten on a plane since the summer of 2019. By this year’s end, I’ll have racked up tens of thousands of miles on various airlines via my perfectly strategized rewards cards (eat your heart out, Dave Ramsey).

I’m chomping at the bit, y’all. Set me loose.

I resolve to go.

I intend to go.

But I resolve-intend to stay, too. To have continued building my strange yet comforting homebody identity of 2020. To have kept making my home even homier. To have built deeper connections with friends in this city and region. To have welcomed at least 12 new people into my home by year’s end — friends, family, and Couchsurfing “strangers” alike.

Am I being insanely ambitious this year? Maybe. Probably.

But it’s time to go.

It’s time to do.

It’s time to be.

It’s a new year, and it’s time to step into the new story laid out for us.