Rvaughn wrote:I never do the New Year's resolution thing.
I have often enough that I can't say "never", but at least I've never been successful at it. In addition to the 52-churches-in-52-weeks one I failed at in 2011, back in about 1978 I made a resolution to quit smoking on New Years Day 1981 or 1982 (I forget which). I made it three or four days. I tried again three or four times, and each time made it three or four days. Each time on the third or fourth day I would get so drunk I forgot I was not smoking and by the time I came to the next morning, I was back at it. So I tried to quit drinking in order to quit smoking, and that lasted... four days. This was the first time I realized that I had something eerily in common with alcoholics. In 1984, God got me sober, rather dramatically, two days before I was planning to kill myself by robbing a bank, and I haven't had a drink since. I tried quitting smoking a couple of times in the years that followed, setting a date etc., but I never lasted more than four days even though I wasn't drinking. Wasn't until April Fool's Day of 2000 that God much less dramatically, almost surreptitiously, relieved me of that one. (The winking emoji in my head says, "Maybe if you'd tried April Fool's resolutions instead of New Years, Leland..."

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