Last year for Christmas, Kirk presented me with a question-card that asked two questions: “What is God trying to free me from?” and “How does he want me to live?”

This resulted in a reflection process that led me to a season of active rest. 

It was a season of asking God to demonstrate himself as the Father who provides for all our needs. And as I wrote here, he did demonstrate that truth with great alacrity in the first few months of the year. He even repeated the demonstration several more times in later months through the way different opportunities continued to present themselves to us. 

And then, as I shared in my life update video more recently, I bumped up against this truth yet again in the way God led me to my new job. (It starts just two weeks from today — I’m so excited!)

Needless to say, the practice of holding an intentional question for the year was incredibly fruitful for us. So this year, we did it again. 

In the days leading up to New Year’s Eve, Kirk and I considered a lot of questions. We kept sifting through them to find the singular question that could frame the year ahead for each of us. And the question I kept coming back to was: 

“What does it look like to live with increasing integrity?”

This has a lot to do with what I shared in my life update video. I shared about the challenge of the past few months of life and how I eventually completed an intentional discernment process to make some hard decisions about my commitments.

The words I kept using during the discernment process were congruence and harmony. These words helped me remember that I was seeking to unify my inner convictions with my outer life. 

In the end, this is all about integrity.

Congruence and harmony concern my commitments. Integrity concerns how I live. Congruence and harmony supply the “what.” Integrity supplies the “how.”

I want to live what I believe. I want to speak honestly to others, and with kindness. I want to represent the truth of who I am always, not just where it feels safe. I want to share who I truly am with those I meet and engage on a regular and not-so-regular basis. 

I want to do this with greater and greater freedom, each and every day. Hopefully, it will soon become the most natural thing of all. 

What about you: how are you intending to live with greater intentionality in the coming year?