Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

“Again, you have heard that it was said to the people long ago, ‘Do not break your oath, but fulfill to the Lord the vows you have made.’ But I tell you, do not swear an oath at all: either by heaven, for it is God’s throne; or by the earth, for it is his footstool; or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the Great King. And do not swear by your head, for you cannot make even one hair white or black. All you need to say is simply ‘Yes’ or ‘No’; anything beyond this comes from the evil one.

• Matthew 5:33-37

The photo is from our wedding. We make wedding “vows.” We make those vows before God, and in God’s eyes, they are binding.

On Shrove Tuesday, all sorts of debauchery occurs.  Why?  Because the next day is Ash Wednesday and they must give up something.

Really?

For those who have made New Years Resolutions, are you going to violate that resolution like crazy before New Years Day gets here?

Then why bother?  You do know that the resolution is for the entire year…  It’s not just six weeks like it is at Lent.

Then again, the average “life expectancy” of a New Years resolution is 3.74 months according to Google AI.  I have no idea where they get that number.  I was expecting much less.  But then 23% give up within the first week.  Then, 64% give up before the end of January. The second Friday in January is called “Quitters Day.” This year, that is 9 January, how pathetic.

So, being a mathematician, if this were a standard bell curve, the average should be less than a month.  But it is those self-control freaks that go all year that totally skew the statistics.  If you eliminate the self-control outliers, then you are talking about less than a month of success.

So, why bother?

But the New Years resolution is a “vow” or “oath”.  Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount that we should not take oaths.  In the first century, people were enough afraid of God to swear by their own head, as to not bring God into the oath.  But why not simply say yes or no?

It is as if you are asking for failure, failure before God, by making a resolution.

When my wife started having complications from her aortic stenosis, I bought her a treadmill.  I set it up so that she could watch TV while she walked.  The treadmill was too loud to hear the television.  The screen seemed to bounce up and down, making her sick.  She had motion sickness if she tried to do anything else while walking, so it almost immediately went into disuse.

The next New Years Eve I resolved to start walking on the treadmill every day.  I walked about two miles.  But then, I started developing pain in my legs.  I switched to walking every other day.  But you would think that with exercise, losing weight, and getting stronger that your pulse rate would come down.  My pulse was getting higher, dangerously higher.  I quit walking for my own good.

As the conditions got worse, I was losing weight without exercising and my pulse was out the roof, often over 200 beats per minute while resting.  When all the tests were complete, I discovered I had Grave’s Disease.  The disease is named after someone with that name, but I am sure lives were lost in the early days.  The disease involves the thyroid getting a false signal that your body needs to rev up.  Your metabolism goes out the roof and you start losing weight.  The pulse increases to supply the body with what it needs for this increase.

I did the medicine route for three years, switching from recovery to relapse and back to recovery.  Then I swallowed the capsule of radioactive iodine and my thyroid died.  Now I only get metabolism through a pill, and when I gain a few pounds, it is extremely hard to lose them.

But that year started with a resolution that was broken within about three months, and my health has been “strange” ever since.  I have wondered if God was reminding me that I had made an oath that I did not keep.

If something is worthy of a resolution, we should just do it.  Resolving, giving a vow, or giving an oath brings God into the picture and we are duty bound at that point to not fail.  And as the statistics show, less than ten percent can do it – and boy are they arrogant when they rub it in your face, calling you a loser.  I claimed that my mother’s self-control revolved around things that she was not tempted to do anyway, so what is the glory of resisting something that you would not do if your life depended on it?

If the answer is yes, let your words be “Yes.”  And resolving to not have a resolution is inconsistent.  When you make a resolution to not have resolutions, you contradict yourself.  Stick to yes and no.

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.