A Word for the coming year

Last year I was challenged and inspired to choose a word for my year. The idea was that for the whole year I would focus on that word or thought and prayerfully use it as a goal.

Well last year I actually chose 2 words, I just couldn't narrow it down to one and both words kept coming to mind so I decided to go with both. They were 'words' and 'time'. My goal for both for the year was to learn to use both my words and my time more wisely.

Did I accomplish that? Sure. Not to perfection of course and obviously there were many times I failed at them. But in general I felt like I was able to keep both ideas in the back of my mind and work towards them all year long. I'm still a work in progress as you already know and I will still need to learn to use my words and time wisely as each year passes. {It's definitely an ongoing process!}

So yesterday as we ate Christmas dinner I brought up the idea to my family. {There were 8 of us, 6 adults and my 2 girls.} I asked the question, 'If you could come up with one word that would be your goal for the coming year, what would it be?'

Here is what everyone came up with:
Health
Motivation
Simplify
Achieve
Focus
Exercise
Ahead
Health {more than one person said it}

The person who said 'ahead' meant financially - not meaning that they're goal was to be rich, but just that through proper budgeting they would be able to get ahead of things this year. I thought that was a good goal.

My daughters shocked me with their maturity ... my 8 year old was the one who said 'achieve' and my 10 year old said 'focus'. Such amazing thoughts/goals for young girls! And I of course told them I would gladly use these words to encourage them in their school work! LOL

My word is Simplify. I have grown weary being in a house filled with things we don't need/want or use. I also get very worn out when our schedules are over crowded. So my goal this year is to simplify our lives. I want to clear out the clutter, clear our schedules more, spend more time doing the simple things like reading books and playing board games and riding bikes together.

I was watching some home movies with my girls this week and I noticed in the videos that when my girls were really little my house had a LOT less stuff. Less furniture, less stuff on the walls, less clutter ... and I was like WOW, how did we get from there to here? How did we accumulate so much unnecessary stuff?!

So those are our words. Last year I spent the first several weeks of the year looking up and writing down scripture passages that related to my words. I plan to do that again this year because really, it doesn't really matter what *I* think about these words, my goal should be what the Lord would want me to do with these goals. I also find that Pinterest has some GREAT inspiration and hope to find some neat sayings/quotes that I can print out for each one of us to help us remember and focus on our goals.

How about you? If you had to choose just one word to sum up your goals for 2012, what would it be? Will you challenge yourself to make it a goal, see what the Word of God has to say about it and work toward it this year?