A New Year's Tradition

Every year over New Years, Don and I go to the city, get a hotel on Priceline, eat at our favorite restaurants, and take time to talk through the previous year and set goals for the coming year. It's one of my favorite traditions!

Our goals are more just things that we want to pray about and ask God for in the coming year. If you are married, I highly recommend doing something like this! It's so good to take time to talk through different areas of our lives, pray together about these areas, and set goals for the future. Time just goes so fast, and if we're not intentional, we find that we don't end up doing the things we want to do or making the progress we want to make.

We have specified four major areas that we talk through and set goals/prayers for. Our areas are: family/marriage, ministry, finances, and personal (meaning personal goals/prayers for each of us individually). We write these things out in a notebook (used only for this purpose) and try to pray through them together at the end of each month (we pray about them more frequently than that, but once a month, we go through the whole thing together). This is a great way for us to stay accountable and to see the ways that God has answered our prayers over the months and even years.

This year, I couldn't take any pictures because our camera is broken once again. If I could have taken a picture, it would have been of us outside of Chicago Pizza & Oven Grinders, bundled up and waiting for close to an hour to be seated at 3 in the afternoon. This place is ALWAYS busy, but it's totally worth the wait. The food is amazing, and so far we haven't found any place that comes close out in the suburbs. 


Luckily, I did find one of us from a few years back. We're a little younger, and it's obviously not winter, but you get the idea...