Year of Ascension

On January 26th of the current year, a YouTube channel called CGP Grey released a video about New Year's Resolutions and a proposed alternative which they called "Your Theme." Upon watching that video this morning, I realized that my New Year's Resolution could use some revisiting, if not some revising, and this video provided a good lens through which to review and reevaluate my goal of Prayer, Hymns, and Meditation.

Essentially, CGP Grey argued that numeric goals are arbitrary and unyielding, and they fail to account for the changes that will inevitably occur in the unforeseeable future. For instance, I set a goal to meditate at least once per week. I don't know if I have kept that up faithfully, but in a way, that doesn't matter. The real goal was to draw closer to God. Meditating weekly was just a method by which I hoped to draw closer to God. If, at the end of the year, I'm closer to God than at the beginning, I succeeded at my goal, no matter how frequently (or infrequently) I meditated.

Prayer, Hymns, and Meditation are good tools I can use to help me get closer to God, and I'll certainly use them for that, but I won't use them as measuring sticks to evaluate whether or not I reached my goal. My ultimate goal is to get closer to God. Whatever I do or don't do to make that happen doesn't matter so long as it works. This is my year of drawing closer to God, or, to put it in the same format as CGP Grey's "themes," my year of ascension. I am going to raise my spirit closer to God regardless of whether or not I use prayer, hymns, and meditation to do it.