Storyboarding

If New Year's Day came with presents instead of black-eyed peas, it'd easily be my favorite holiday. Though the promise around which I embrace the fresh start each new year gifts us rarely endures a full calendar, time and again I look forward to making (or at least thinking about how to make) each new year better, somehow, than the prior year.


2010 has been a fine year. I traveled to new places, spent good times with old friends. Sadly, I cannot say I did anything extradordinary for myself or others to make it one for the record books. In fact, as I was coming up with the Top 10 moments of 2010 for our Christmas card there was nothing showcased that I'm particulary proud to remember. Sure I got to brag to about seeing George Clooney in Hawaii, but that's not really going to matter in the grand scheme of my life.

Storyboarding is a process that's used in making movies, commericials, sometimes even books. It's a lay-out of photos that illustrates how the story should look before it is shot or sometimes even written. As January 1 nears, I've been storyboarding in my mind how I want my next year to look. I want to make 2011 more than just a fine year.


Last night, I was thumbing through A Million Miles in a Thousand Years by Donald Miller. It's a book that blends the easiest parts of Christianity and basic Moving Making 101 to inspire readers to give their own life's story a beginning, middle and end worth watching.

I've read this book before, and love it, so this week, while revisiting it with thoughts of a new year and obligatory resolutions, this line really caught my attention:

 "you can't go back to meaningless scenes stiched together by the forgettable thread of wasted time"

I waste a lot of time, and wasted plenty of it in 2010. Just as Miller claims he does, "I live terrific lives in my head".  In 2011, I want to take my vivid, hopeful daydreams - even the most simple ones (and especially the most pure-hearted ones) - and put them into a focus beyond just my empty thoughts. 

I want to stop living (to steal a line - again - from Miller) on "the fringes of" my faith, and learn to live, as I have successfully before, resting in it. I know that in years when my life has been more balanced and healthy it is because I have found order through faith.

I know, also, that there are the standard resolutions I need to entertain: eat less, excerise more; spend less, give more. For the first time in a long while, though, I feel like all of the pre-production for the story of my 2011 has everything to do with simply putting what I know in my head and my heart into action - instead of just thinking (err, blogging..) about it.

As the time ticks away in 2010, I need to decide the first scene of my New Year's storyboard....and I suppose I need to decide, too, how I want the credits to roll when 2011 ends. 

What will your story be for 2011?