Your Word

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! We watched the movie Eat Pray Love recently. It's a true story (and book) by a woman named Elizabeth, recently divorced, who travels around the world in search of her life's meaning. She stops in Italy (to Eat), India (to Pray), and Bali (where she finds Love). When Elizabeth is in Rome, one of her friends explains to her that each city has "one word" that defines it - like "Ambition" for New York - and then gives her a personal challenge to define herself in one word.

This scene reminded me of a yearly tradition we have in our household. When we were Trinity Fellows our friend Shannon asked us all to share one word that defined the previous year, and then to share one word that we hoped would define the next year. We've been doing it ever since!

The exercise is interesting because it requires you to consider the past year's events - it's joys and sorrows - along with your responsibilities and relationships to find one single word that could define an entire year. It then it requires you to consider your hopes, dreams, prayers, and desires for your life (or more specifically, your next year). Our "word" speaks a lot about who we are (both our stories and our characters), and who we want to be.

So if you're reading this, let us pass the tradition on to you. What is your word for this past year? Next?

Stay tuned for our "words" in the coming days. In light of all that has happened in our families this year, we have a lot of words to sort through!

By the way, we're up to 6 miles in our training program which we found especially hard to accomplish after fattening up on all of the baked goods of the season!

Note to self, Eggnog is not a protein shake.