Happy New Year! The beginning of the year encourages a myriad of ways to set goals for yourself.
What are your New Years resolutions?
What are your goals for the New Year?
What word encapsulates what you want to accomplish in 2023?
Answering those questions, be they at the start of the year, midway through a project, or at the conclusion of an event, requires an effective self-reflection process. Ideally, said process happens both individually and in relationship, be that with a partner, a friend or family member, or larger community.
In this episode, Julia and Jeremiah describe three practices, rooted in our Evangelical upbringing, that can provide a structure for having these conversations.
1) Month and Review (6:30): Julia explains:
"Month and Review was a time for my family to reflect on three different things: answered prayer, prayer requests, and Thanksgiving and praise. So totally loaded with religious language that I don't use right now. Prayer requests, I would say, are desires. What do I want? Or if you're in the context of a partner or a family, what do we want?"
2) Grief Practices (11:00): Julia describes:
"The grief practice is a practice in which an individual, or in the case of my college, a group intentionally gathered to give name to losses, pain, injustice, trauma, disappointment, unfulfilled dreams, et cetera. The practice allowed us to mourn, to be angry at God, ask hard questions, cry, or whatever else we needed. What happened is that the religious structure was a new structure that was unlike the structure that I had for the first almost decade of my life. And that was a structure in a system which gave permission not just to me, but other people to grieve. And not only was the grief okay, but that the act of grieving, especially within community, was a sacred process."
3) Process-Centered Evaluation (19:00): Jeremiah summarizes:
