I use blogs as a kind of journal, although thematically. My main blog is for—mostly—discussion of my science fiction and fantasy hobbies. I have another one for hiking, and one for my Street Fighter-like video games, and a few others as well, although for ease of use, my main blog ends up getting bleed from all of the other topics, and every other blog is somewhat content impoverished as a result. This blog is, in theory, for the discussion of political, social and religious opinions and polemics and navel-gazing, or whatever. It's actually got the potential to be a much better blog than it is, but because I tend to only complain about social and political problems, it's probably neither very positive, nor very useful, and updated much too infrequently to be of use to anyone at all, even me. And I blog for me; I tend to not mind that others can see my journal in the form of a blog, and I write in such a way that if someone were to stumble across it and identify me, I wouldn't have anything to be overly embarrassed about on it other than the amateurishness of the writing. That said, there's an opportunity to transform this blog into more of a real spiritual journal, rather than complaints about problems in our world. Which brings up our goals for the new year.
I sometimes shy away from New Years' resolutions, because I think that if a goal is a good one to set, then there is never a better time than the present, rather than waiting for a milestone like the new year. In our case, the new year actually was a good time to set goals, because it marks a period of change in our household. My youngest two sons still have their permanent addresses here, but with one at college out west and the other on a mission in California for another year, we only had my 24 year old daughter at home. She just got married less than a week ago, and after we finish cleaning up the mess that our house has become due to her living here, my sons being in town (not the missionary one), extended family hanging around, and tons of wedding stuff to figure out what to do with, we have embarked on a new chapter in our life as new nearly empty nesters, coincidentally at the beginning of a new year.
My wife has already expressed an interest in two goals; one forcing a more positive and less complainy attitude; while we excise the bad habit of complaining, we'll need to probably convert complaints into looking for silver linings. As the bad habit recedes, we'll hopefully just have much more positive things to see and say in general.
She's also expressed an interest in scheduling monthly temple visits, which has been difficult these last few months due to a variety of factors, including our hectic wedding preparations, as well as monthly double dates with some other empty nester friends of ours.
I've wanted to reaffirm some goals that we've set in the past, and don't not do, but which we're not as consistent and faithful as I'd like us to be: morning and evening couple prayers, and every day scripture slash Come Follow Me reading. I'd also like to continue making sure that my most days Book of Mormon reading converts into every day Book of Mormon reading.
And finally, since my daughter married a non-member, we've got a lot of concerns about her spirituality on an ongoing basis, not to mention his. I'm not quite sure what the goal is there, but we want to make sure we continue to see her at church every Sunday and maybe do scripture study with them every Sunday evening.
There can always be more, but I prefer not to run faster than we have strength, as the saying goes. Let's work on these and then see what else develops as potential throughout the year.
