Geared up for the new year — Jenny Zibane

And then it was the beginning of yet another year…

I’ve heard a lot of people say that the first month felt like a year on its own, that they don’t see how they’re going to make it through a whole year when they could barely make it through a month. 72 days of January they say.

It’s that time of the year when gyms are packed and the streets are jammed with traffic. It’s that time of the year when goals and resolutions are put into place, when we go in head-first, ready and set to tackle the problems that are hindering us from reaching our full potential — or dream body in some cases!

We start the year sprinting, only to find ourselves jogging in place by the time we reach June, and the only reason why this happens is that we (myself included) think that we’re running a race against those around us instead of ourselves.

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It’s easy to lose sight of what our focus is when we never really had one in the first place, when we managed to convince everyone else that we’re going to “get it right!” this year when we haven’t even grasped the concept of “a one-man race”, when we haven’t come to understand that it’s up to us to conquer or to be conquered.

Over the past two weeks, the youth group at my church has been focusing on the person of Jesus Christ and all the misconceptions that come along with Him.

Last Friday, the speaker [Yeshua Moraka, ChurchAlive] said something so profound; he mentioned how he would rather find himself in a constant state of fighting in prayer than find himself suffocating from the stresses of life.

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After hearing that, I knew it was something that I had to share. So many times (or years rather) we find ourselves trying to start things off by ourselves. We start making plans without first asking God what He thinks of them; we get into relationships that suffocate our relationship with God; make commitments that clash with Sunday services; and yet when we reach June and are all burned out we ask God why He has forsaken us, why He hasn’t helped us, forgetting that we never made Him a part of things in the first place.

Proverbs 16:3 clearly states: ‘’Commit your actions to the Lord, and your plans will succeed.’’
There’s no point in getting a new shot at something if we’re going to be doing the same thing a different way, expecting a new outcome.

So I hope that in 2019 we would be intentional about everything that we do instead of just going where the wind takes us. That we would take control of our lives by fully submitting them to God first and take those steps that we’ve been so afraid to take.