And my word for the year is ...

Matt’s sitting next to me reading the newspaper and noshing on a plate of fruit. Nothing new to our morning. This is the thing we do, the way we start every day. I vary in the way I consume words: email, Facebook, Bible, text messages, a book with a spiritual slant (too early in the morning for fiction, you know?). But my Steady Eddy sticks to the paper. He often glances my way and asks, “May I interrupt?” And he’ll share some tidbit that caught his eye.

Today, he said, “Last year, you had a word for the year instead of a New Year’s resolution, right? And it was no?” He gestured to a page of the Orlando Sentinel, an article about resolutions on his iPad screen.

Yes, it was no.

I felt so strongly about learning to apply the right no that I ordered butcher-block wood cuts of the two letters and balanced them on my desk. By mid-year, I put them in the drawer, embarrassed and tired of the quizzical looks. A sweet gal I met a couple of years ago sent me her copy of The Best Yes around the same time.

And I thought, “Did I get my word right?”

I did. No was the right word for my 2015. She taught me a lot, her tiny self, often by redirecting my sight from one thing to another. No to self-doubt, yes to confidence. No to Starbucks for lunch, yes to homemade. No to this book, yes to that one. No to the crowd, yes to the solitary run. No to hiding, yes to honesty.

She taught me to pause. And listen. And ask again and again, “Is this best?”

For the most part, the lessons I learned from no were in my thinking, not in my actions. So I’m making a new-for-me decision this year. I’m not done with this word no just yet. She will stay my companion for a while longer.

I’m going to make no an action this year. For one month (yep, all twelve of them), I’ll be saying no to something. I’ll do my best not to be cavalier about it, and instead rely on the pause no taught me, the trust that the right answers reside with the God in and around me.

I know some of the things I’d like to say no to until I can regain balance in quantity and quality. For one, sugar. Sugar is so nice, so sweet, so fine. A slice of pumpkin pie with a cold glass of almond milk. I feel my cells sigh, “Why, sure. That’d be nice.”

The sugar in the entire share-size bag of peanut M&M’s, inhaled in a frenzy in lieu of, say, a kale salad or black bean burrito?

Those same cells in my body beg no. They whisper, “This is not what we need.” Every time I stand up or roll over or swing my leg over my bike saddle, parts of me groan. Groan, I tell you. I’m not sure what is giving me horrible aches these days, but a thought keeps at me, suggesting sugar (and not chemo leftovers or menopause or forgetting to stretch after runs) might be what’s ailing me.

Worse still—so very much worse—are my planetary and humanitarian fears about sugar and the chocolate that so often accompanies it. Did children living in slavery harvest the cocoa? Did the sugar growers cause the land around their plantations to be forever ruined?

I don’t know, nor do I know if avoiding sugar for a month will ease my joints. But I do know this: God is very much in the business of restoration. Healing. Making new. And this business is simultaneously universal and local, macro and micro, gargantuan and infinitesimal.  It is everyone—every dang one—and somehow, bizarrely, me too. My joints are under his ever-watchful eye. So are the children, all of the children, the whole world over. And the land and the growers, too.

So, for the month of January, I’ll say no to sugar.

I have no illusions that my choice will somehow fix deeply wrong things. It’s more like this: I want to participate in healing. For me. And for everything and everyone else, too.

I have heard recovery folks say that no makes space for God. For the first time in my life, I have a glimmer of what that means. It goes something like this: I love to listen to my iPod. It’s loaded up with a variety of stuff. Bluegrass, worship, kid fun, podcasts, and It’s all about the base. I listen in my car, when I’m cooking dinner, and occasionally on a walk.

But often, I have to just turn the dang thing off. I cannot think with my earbuds in. And I most certainly can’t hear someone say my name.

So that’s what my friends mean about creating space for God. If I take the earbuds out, I can think. I can hear other voices. If I say no to sugar, I might (might) be able to hear what my body is asking for—or even understand a smidge of the global repercussions of my choice. But until I say no, I can’t hear. There is no space for me to see and feel what God is up to.

Perhaps by the end of January, balance will have been restored to the force. Perhaps I’ll make different choices about sugar moving ahead. Perhaps not. Either way, I’m going to pause and listen and ask what’s next.

In February, I might say no to Facebook and Instagram (thank you for the idea, Pam). And March might bring another kind of no, like no work emails on Sundays, so that I fully rest, or no 7-Eleven coffee stops on the way to work to remember to pray for my kids in Malawi who don’t have that option. Or no makeup for a month as a way to remind myself to drop the mask and be honest.

We’ll see. I’ll know more after more listening. For now, here’s the deal:

My word for 2016 is no.