"New Year" Resolution

I've never been one for New Years resolutions. It's not that I have trouble keeping them it's more that I can't figure out what's most important. This birthday has been different for me. I've been thinking a lot about my weaknesses and the things in my life that I am not satisfied with.

For the past few weeks, it seems every conversation I've had and everything I've read keeps taking me back to one thing...Confidence. Confidence is something that I am seriously lacking. I lack confidence as a musician, a minister, a husband, and a father. I've always been insecure in just about every area of my life. Several things recently, however, have contributed to these insecurities. I struggle to provide for my family the way I want, we don't have a place of our own to call home, and this year we were not able to take a family vacation. I know these things are all trivial in the grand scheme of things, but they are all ways that I want to make my family happy and provide a good life for them. When I can't do that my confidence level plummets.

I also struggle as a musician. I don't know how it is in other professions, but in the music profession there is constant comparison, mainly because we are constantly bombarded with music, and the music is just getting better and better while I feel like I'm stuck in the same style and not growing in my skills.

Confidence, or the lack of, has always been a serious issue for me, and it's one that I'm not really sure how to overcome. So what does this have to do with a New Year resolution? Well, in short, my resolution for year 34 is to figure out how to have confidence in a constantly improving world, and more than that, how to have confidence when my life goals go unattained.

My theme verse, coincidentally, comes from Psalm 34. I felt the Lord leading me to this chapter in prayer the other day. Allow me to share some verses from this chapter.

Verse 1: I will bless the Lord at all times, His praise shall continually be in my mouth.
Verse 2: My soul shall make it's boast in the Lord.
Verse 4: I sought the Lord, and he heard me, and delivered me from all my fears (insecurities).
Verse 10b: But those who fear the Lord shall not lack any good thing.

As the Lord was directing me to this passage in prayer it seems that He was telling me some crucial things to help me have confidence.
1. I need to have praise on my lips at all times. When I am praising, He becomes greater while all the trivial things in life become smaller and smaller.
2. If I can't boast in anything of myself, I can surely boast and be confident in the Lord
3. When I seek the Lord, he will surely hear me and deliver me from all my fears, anxieties, insecurities, etc.
4. When I do seek the Lord, I will not lack any good thing.

Honestly, I don't know what lies ahead for this new year in my life, but I have a word from the Lord to hold on to, and sometimes that's all it takes. He has promised that His word will never fail, so I have to trust in that word.

So when you think of me, please say a prayer. But I also anticipate to end 34 more confidently than I started.