Is it too early to think about your One Word for 2020?

It's Advent, the start of the new liturgical year! And time to think about next calendar year, which is what I normally do and then wait way too late to do something about it. I also have a whole month left to assess how I've done with this year's plans and resolutions—and make good a little before it's time to try again with the new ones. 😏

Last year I chose a word for the year to guide me in a more intentional way of living. It's not the first time I've done that, but that time around I ended up having two words. One of them was a word I happened to choose after thinking and praying about what I wanted to do and who I wanted to become this year. It came to me like an image coming into focus before my eyes, and I thought to myself, "This. This is a call." The other word came from Jen Fulwiler's Word of the Year Generator, which I think was new last year, and in any case I couldn't resist jumping on the bandwagon and when it tossed up its word to me it was too good to turn down. It had the same appeal as the one I came up with.

The word I came up with was "Serve." The word the generator came up with was "Surrender." 

Well, the "surrender" part came easily enough—that is, opportunities to surrender to God's will were plentiful, and often the only way I had peace. To take a most obvious example, we found out early in the year that, at 44 years old, and God willing, I was going to have my twelfth baby before the year was over. There's a reason we have so many children—they are awesome, they bring so much love and light to our lives, to the world. But—and ask anyone who accepts and lives the Church's teaching about the goods of marriage and the call to be open to life that is included in it—surrender is a big part of that. 

That might have really been the word God meant for me this year rather than the one I came up with. I had decided, and meant, to dig deep and serve my family with a new devotion, and to be more attentive to ways to serve the wider world. I'm an introvert, and it has been easy to slip into a manner of "keeping close" as a self-protective measure, surrounded as I always am by people, noise, work—all of which amount to lots of demands for attention. I wanted to counter that tendency with a deliberate effort to give of myself and expected both practical and spiritual benefits to meeting the needs of my loved ones in a more proactive way. But honestly, the farther we all got into the year and this pregnancy, the more everyone was serving me. A good friend pointed out to me early on that this pregnancy's demands could be God's way of getting me to rest. I do think there's a lot of beauty and goodness in this inversion of my idea of serving, in allowing others to be a blessing to me. I have, fundamentally, been serving the new life God has created. And there were still plenty of opportunities for me to serve my family alongside this pregnancy. 

But now that the pregnancy is over and my body is a little bit more my own again, I am looking forward to getting more active in my own life again, its comings and goings, its big and little tasks. I'm finding my little word is popping up in my mind now, in this last month of the year, helping me to focus my goals and my efforts. And it's suggesting to me some possibilities for choosing a word to focus on in the coming year. Or maybe I'll get a "random" word from the generator. Or maybe both, again. I think it's too soon to commit just yet. But it's not too soon to think about.