This reflection was written by Jesse Zink for this week’s Wingèd Ox, a weekly news digest distributed to the college community. You will find reflections from previous weeks here.

The turn into a new year is an opportunity for many people to set goals for themselves, to articulate new aspirations, and to imagine a future different. Often these get expressed in the form of new year’s resolutions, which, as the name suggests, are demonstrations of a person’s resolve to make changes in their life. Precisely because of this I tend to tread somewhat warily around such resolutions. They rely a bit too heavily on individual will power, which Christians have historically been somewhat skeptical of. As St. Paul writes to the Romans, “I do not understand my own actions… I find it to be a law that when I want to do what is good, evil lies close at hand.” (Romans 7:15, 21). Or, to put it in more seasonally appropriate language, “I just can’t figure it out: I want to exercise more but I keep hitting the snooze button on that early alarm.” But I do find the start of anew semester is a good opportunity to reflect on how I use my time. Too often, I find that it is possible in the crush of a semester to lose sight of how I’d like to be using my time and simply let myself get overwhelmed by what is most immediately pressing.

So the start of the year and the start of a new semester isa good time to think about what went well for you in the semester past and what you would like to change. Did you find enough time in your life for things like exercise, eating well, time with your friends and family, time outside and away from screens, and so many of the other things that are central to a healthy life and healthy relationships? Did you find enough time in your life for the practices that are foundational to nurturing your relationship with God, including individual and corporate prayer, reading the Bible (outside of having to write an exegesis paper on a passage), and serving others? As your class schedule shifts in this new semester, I encourage you to think about how our prayer practices in St. Luke’s chapel will be part of your life as well. Everyone’s pattern and participation will be different but praying with one another in community—and not just on days when you are on the rota to lead worship—is one of the best ways of deepening our collective faith and service to God and growing as a worship leader.

The American author Annie Dillard once wrote, “How we spend our days is of course how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour and that one is what we are doing.” I find it an important spiritual discipline, therefore, to reflect periodically and be accountable to myself for how I use the time God has given me on this earth. Yes, it’s true I’ll probably fail to achieve all the goals I set for myself. But when I see the span of my life as a gift from God and reflect on how I am receiving this gift, I often find that—slowly—I can make changes that lead to the kind of healthier and abundant life to which God is calling all of us.

Happy new year!