The Best Year You Can Ever Have

Rachel Watkins shares a spiritual alternative to the "new year, new you" way of thinking.

The problem with reading such wonderfully delightful books like C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe and Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland is that you can come to want a wardrobe or rabbit hole of your own. You can go through life hoping that on any given day something transformational will happen to you.

I was that child and became that teenager and even have those same thoughts as an adult. Why won’t something supernatural or miraculous happen to me? But, much to my dismay every closet door I open reveals only coats and unlike Alice, the rabbit holes in my own backyard stay in Maryland. In other words, I have learned that what happens in fantastical books doesn’t happen in real life.

My growing up was rather unremarkable. I was never revealed to be a forgotten princess and received no inheritance from a long lost relative. I was as most people are, just a regular person but too many times I was disappointed by my reality. I often felt I was just a day away from becoming amazing.

And, while I haven’t read books like this for years, I have found I fight this feeling of needing to be exceptional at the beginning of every new year.

Every year, I have to fight the urge to make THIS year my best year. This is the year a very special wardrobe will show up in my life. This year I will be transformed by a fall down a rabbit hole. This is the year I fix all my problems, the year I will accomplish every dream I have and I will become as they say, "my best self."

Won’t I ever learn?

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My best self is the one that knows that God sees me every day and that is enough. I don’t need a trip to the land with a remarkable lion to be transformed. In God’s eyes, I am unique and spectacular because I am made in His image and likeness and not a lost princess. Each of my attempts to be a better reflection of His love to my family, friends and strangers is greeted with cheers from the myriad of angels and saints in heaven. They see me and my attempts and they think I’m really pretty great.

The wardrobe I had been looking for are the doors of my church. There is a miracle at every Mass, and sacramental Confession actually does transform me. A new world is opened up for me at every prayer time or reading of Scripture. And that is exactly what I think C.S. Lewis imagined for all of us.

There are no magical doors waiting to whisk us away from our real life. We remain where God has placed us, where the adventure awaiting us takes place in carpool and supermarket lines.

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The best year you can ever have is the one committed to trying to serve God and follow His son Jesus a little more closely. The best adventure you will ever find is the one with your family; no talking beavers or white rabbits are necessary.

To that end, it has become a tradition in my family to find a patron saint for the year (might I recommend SaintsNameGenerator.com) to journey with us. We also look for a new Scripture verse to inspire us, and there are any number of sites that do that.

Neither action is done in a superstitious manner, but rather knowing that there are saints who want to adventure with us and that Scripture is there to inspire us. And none of us take as much advantage of either as we should.

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Every year, I have to fight the urge to make THIS year my best year. #CatholicMom

I still have hope the new year will be remarkable in some way. To that end, I am going to give C.S. Lewis another look; both his fictional world and his view of the real world. He knew what the book of Lamentations reminds us: