“Hold firmly to the word of life; then, on the day of Christ’s return, I will be proud that I did not run the race in vain and that my work was not useless.”

It’s the first Monday in April (and no, it’s not April Fools Day) and so begins the second business quarter of the year. Today, somewhere in the business, the tallying up of Q1 is occurring.  How much did we sell?  How much did we spend?  How many new customers did we acquire?  How many did we lose?  How many people did we add?  How many did we lose?  How much profit we did make?  How much did we lose?  And with those numbers will come a story of the first quarter and how it relates to our ability to achieve the rest of the fiscal year goals and expectations. The quarterly dance is as old as companies have been held by public shareholders with analysts who make their living on telling shareholders if the numbers are good, bad or whatever.  And so we can look back, assess at this point in time, and see if we need to resolve to do things differently or not to meet our objectives.

We may have resolved at the beginning of this calendar year to change ourselves in some way.  Lose weight, get stronger, eat or drink less, read more, be more open, take more time to ourselves, etc.  And we may have resolved to draw ourselves closer to God through more consistent time in the Bible, prayer, worship or fellowship with others.  Should we account to how we are doing against our resolutions?  Paul tells us to always be resolved in our commitment and so yes, now, the beginning of a calendar quarter is as good of a time as any to calibrate where we are against where we want to be.  Benjamin Franklin said, “Resolve to perform what you ought; perform without fail what you resolve.”  We will always fail in our resolutions, and God gets that in us, but it doesn’t take away from Him wanting us to have resolve.

Reference: Philippians 2:16 (New Living Translation)