What About All The New Years Promises We Make
The What:
A New Year's resolution is a promise an individual makes for the coming year. Whatever resolution or resolutions a person commits to, the purpose is to enhance their life in the coming year.
Resolutions come in different kinds and varieties and from a diverse group of individuals. One person may promise to change a bad habit, such as quit smoking, some resolve to lose weight, others pledge to stop munching on Twinkies and such. Others vow
to start to go to church; a few say they will try to be more positive and some state they will try to get along with others.
Today, resolving to change so as to enrich one's life is an almost a necessary part of the change when a new year happens.
Though it is a well-documented fact that most make these pledges at the beginning of a new year and fail to keep them, we continue creating them, while knowing we will not be able to keep them, but this does not make us unique. People come up with different ones all over the world.
Making promises for the new year goes back to historic Rome. Emperor Julius Caesar decided to change some things. One idea he had was to rearrange the calendar by establishing the first day of January as the start of a new year.
This change occurred around 46 B.C. Tradition tells us the first month of the year is called January in honor of a two-faced Roman God known as Janus. Janus was the Roman god of beginnings, gates, transitions, time, doorways, passages, and endings.
The month of January held special appeal for the Romans because they thought that the two-faced god symbolically gazed back through the previous year and ahead into the new year, so
the Romans presented sacrifices such as female pig or a female lamb, to this god while making pledges of exceptional conduct for the coming new year.
Moving ahead a couple of thousand years, the new years day, for Christians, became the time for looking at previous errors while
Moving ahead a couple of thousand years, the new years day, for Christians, became the time for looking at previous errors while
Moving ahead a couple of thousand years, the new years day, for Christians, became the time for looking at previous errors while deciding to improve one's habits in the new year.
English minister John Wesley, the initiator of the Methodist Denomination, organized The Covenant Renewal Service, which was a time of self-examination, reflection, and dedication and wholly giving up themselves and renewing their covenant with God.
This service occurred on New Year’s Eve or New Year’s Day. However, towards the end of Wesley's life, this service was observed on the last Sunday before January one.
In the present day, this service is called Watch Night Service. The service features Scripture readings along with the singing of Christian music. The Watch Night Service offered a spiritual alternative to the secular celebrations usually scheduled to mark the approaching new year.
Watch Night Service is well liked in Protestant churches and take place on New Year’s Eve. During the service, time is spent singing hymns, praying and making resolutions for the coming year.
In spite of its, spiritual origins, New Year’s resolutions these days are largely a worldly thing. People, in the beginning, made promises to the gods, but today most people make resolutions only to themselves and focus purely on self-improvement, which reveals why such declarations are so tough to keep.
Modern studies show that in an average of seven million people in the United States say they make New Year’s resolutions, but only eight percent claim success in keeping the promise to self.
However, that horrible history will not prevent men and women from coming up with resolutions, after all, we have had approximately four thousand years of making them, and as the saying goes, old habits are hard to break.
What are your New Year resolutions?
Recent Comments
1
No resolutions just setting goals. Same as I do every week.