We are four months into the new year and it’s a good time to reflect, make corrections, and update our plan to achieve our desired end state.

What is your desired end state for 2024? As we take down Christmas trees and make plans for 2025 in nine months, how do you want your faith life to look? How do you want your marital relationship to be? What do you want for your children? Looking back on 2024, what do you want to have contributed to your church and local community? Finally, lastly, what do you want to say about your professional life, your working life, and your relationships with your coworkers?

If you can put yourself at the end of the year, imagining that a new president has been elected, imagining that the Christmas presents have been opened and the garbage cans on the street are full of wrapping paper and imagining thoughts of the coming year, what do you want to be able to say about 2024?

Truthfully, we don’t have control over American relations with China or Israel’s war with Hamas. And some things will never change. The news media will lie, politicians will do what benefits their careers, progressives will pander to the disenfranchised, and all over, people will be acting in hurtful and sometimes helpful ways. The only thing over which you have control is your behavior, your vision for your life, and the actions you take toward that vision.

In the coming months, some people will focus on what everybody else is doing. They will hope for just the right politician, judge and criticize others, complain about the things that never change, and all the while, they will miss their opportunity to create powerful alignment in their own lives. Whether they realize it or not, they will do this thinking that it absolves them of responsibility for their own actions. It doesn’t.

What will your next nine months look like? Will you think through a vision for your life, write down your desired end state, establish critical goals and methods for their achievement, and work each day to achieve them, or will you fall into the camp of those aimless souls who miss their opportunity to lead their families at home and their fellow Americans on the streets, in churches, in businesses, and in the marketplaces of our nation?

Without a doubt, we live our lives one day at a time. Inescapably, we are responsible for our actions and inactions. When this year is over, what will you say about who you have been and what you have done?

God bless and semper fi,