Change and discernment

Jan 03, 2025

Word in Progress - Karen-Michaela Tan

I hate New Year’s resolutions. Though in our Malaysian culture, it has been proven time and time again that the good intentions of the English new year are quickly overridden by the largesse and consumerism of the Chinese Lunar New Year, people persist in outlining things that they feel they will manage to accomplish in the next 365 days.

Market research and American data specialist Statista tracked new year resolutionmaking among the American population and has listed saving more money, eating healthier, exercising more, losing weight and spending more time with friends and family as the top five goals for the coming year. The Malaysian equivalent, though unpolled, is probably very similar.

The reason I dislike hearing about people’s resolutions is the fact that these goals are rarely backed up with a road map of how they will be achieved. It’s almost as if people think that speaking of the endgame will guarantee results. Having been there and done it, I have found that the only way resolution-setting has a whisper of hope of success is if it is backed by discernment and has faith and God in the mix.

Everything I have grandiosely proclaimed that I would achieve in the course of a year has derailed because it was driven solely by myself. Basing everything on the sole power of Me is a guaranteed way to crash and burn, because we are flawed, failed and fallen people. Yet the trainwreck that is the human race was created by God, for God, and in the image and likeness of God.

So, if you are going to make a resolution, remember that the presence or absence of God in that journey will make the difference between success and failure. This is because change - real, long-lasting change – begins with conversion. Only when a person is convicted wholly does conversion take place.

From a Catholic standpoint, I also want to point out that conversion is never planned; most of the time it is a sudden, bolt-out-of-theblue occurrence that is not tied to a season or a calendar date. While most biblical conversions are immediate, life-changing occurrences (think Saul of Tarsus’ blinding on the road to Damascus in Acts 9:1-9, the Philippian jailor in Acts 16:30 who was converted by Paul and Silas, and Zacchaeus the tax collector in Luke 19:1-10), Scripture also tells of steady, slow-burn conversions which begin slowly, is nurtured over a period of Scripture reading and faithful adherence to the law, and then fanned into a consistent, unwavering flame of faith by one fateful encounter (the Ethiopian eunuch in Acts 8:38, and Lydia, the dealer in purple cloth in Acts 16:14-15).

A catalyst is nearly always necessary for change to happen, but unfortunately for most diet-minded people, desiring to be a size 30 instead of 40 is never as pressing when fresh pretzels beckon, or when you’ve had a stressful day fuelled only by hard-boiled eggs and carrot sticks. So, if you are thinking about setting resolutions pertaining to your weight this year, may I suggest gaining something as you lose those kilos?

If you are dreading cutting out fancy coffees and pretty pieces of cake, how about buying them as a treat for the colleague who always packs their meal to work, and never joins the others for lunches in their bid to save money? You can find out the person’s birthday and give them a gourmet treat.

Or if you decide to replace your food with diet shakes, how about dropping off a 10 kilo bag of rice to a soup kitchen, or sponsoring the cost of restaurant meals you did not eat in vegetables and pantry staples for a street feeding enterprise? This way you are not working on your weight loss in a void. You can still purchase the things you like, but instead of consuming the calories, you spread goodness.

Fasting, especially done intermittent-style, also helps to keep one calorie-deficit, and if paired with prayer, will do wonders with the dieting state of mind which often is much too taken up with thoughts of the foods we deny ourselves. A friend of mine made it a habit to say the Divine Mercy chaplet each time he felt the urge to snack. As the pedantic code writer he was, he counted every chaplet he said. Over the course of 2024 he said 513 chaplets and lost 14 kilos. He has also become less compulsive and irritable from the infusion of prayer. This year he will incorporate exercise into his diet practice and jog in place for the length of a Hail Mary each time he wants to eat something he does not need to.

When setting any kind of resolution, it is also helpful to have some discernment about why you’ve chosen a particular aspect of your life to work on. As a career overeater, I can tell you my issue with food is not the lack of control but the amount of stress in my life. The two are co-related and if I tackled only the eating with calorie restrictions and food group control, I would invariably be brought down because I was not addressing the fact that I did not seek help, sympathy or emotional support in times of stress. When I did call a friend instead of eating a box of breadsticks, chances are the need for snacks would cease.

Therefore, if overspending is an issue you want to work on this year, you will need to be honest and track your emotional state when you are tempted to add things in your online shopping cart, or go to the bookstore, or wherever you find your emotional comfort items. Good sense flies out the window when we are emotional, and it is only when we identify the emotional triggers that we can begin to realize we use retail therapy as a substitute for the things our hearts really crave.

Last year a friend saved RM700 every month by realising that emotions relating to a particular time of the month (no, it was not hormonal) caused her to whip out her credit card. When she started tracking her feelings, and the dates of her most overboard purchases, she discovered her trigger, and by sticking to the plan of calling one of three neighbours and friends to either talk, or go out for a walk together, she managed to break a cycle of credit card debt.

Additionally, to replace a negative emotion and action with a positive one, she adopted a family through her parish’s St Vincent De Paul Society. She uses some of the money she no longer spends frivolously on keyboard lessons for a child from that family, who loves music, has a natural ear for it, but never had the ability to pursue it because of financial constraints.

Amazing things can happen when we stop looking to self-comfort, and search instead for ways to be the comforter. Taking a line out of Saint Francis’ Prayer for Peace is a great start to turning personal adversity into lifeenhancing growth. When used in conjunction with discernment and proper goal-setting, a trite New Year resolution can become catalyst to real conversion and a whole new way of drawing us closer to God.

(Karen-Michaela Tan is a poet, writer and editor who seeks out God’s presence in the human condition and looks for ways to put the Word of God into real action.)