A two-hundred-year-old New Year resolution shows that while some things have changed, our basic spiritual aspirations remain much the same.
On New Year’s Day 1811, Richard Wood sat down at his desk to reflect on the start of the year. It was a snowy day in the tiny southern New Jersey hamlet of Greenwich, the place where Wood, one of the town’s most prominent residents, owned a store and tended his fields. Wood wrote in the pages of his almanac diary, a small, pocket-sized journal in which he recorded everyday events and business transactions from his agricultural life:
Another year has passed away, & if I can say there has been improvement made in the past year, that I may commence the present in a better situation, in point of duty toward the Great & Wise Arbiter who knows all our situations and standings, respecting our faithfulness to him, that we need not deceive ourselves by drawing favorable conclusions [that it is] better with us than it really is; & on investigation of my spiritual progress, I dare not say I have made any, though hope, through mercy there has been rather gaining ground in this very & most important of all other considerations—And my earnest desire is that I may be so favored as to be found better at the end of the present year than I begin it, if life should be continued so long unto me. But at the present feel myself very poor, & my spiritual understanding veiled from knowing my true standing respecting my situation with him, who in his infinite goodness, has extended unmerited favours to me a poor unworthy creature.
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