Inspire, empower, and celebrate women
Guardian Angel Grace offers pearls of wisdom
Thanks for downloading the 5 tips to keep your New Year’s Resolutions. Let’s plan on making this new year one to cheer about. Remember to get grounded first. Clear the clutter in your mind to make room for the creativity, space, and openness needed to stay focused on what matters.
I read a beautiful prayer from the book entitled “The Power of a Praying Wife” by Stormie Omartian. I’d like to share it with you. I reworded it to fit your situation and I hope it helps you see and respond in a new way. Let me know what type of impact this has.
Dear Lord,
Help me to be a good ex-wife. I fully realize that I don’t have what it takes to be one without your help. Take my selfishness, impatience, and irritability and turn them into kindness, long-suffering, and willingness to bear all things. Take my old emotional habits, mindsets, automatic reactions, rude assumptions, and self-protective stance and make me patient, kind, good, faithful, gentle and self- controlled. Take the hardness of my heart and break down the walls with your gentle touch of revelation. Give me a new heart and work in me your love, peace, and joy. I am not able to rise above who I am at this moment. Only you can transform me.
Show me where I have failed in my heart, especially with regard to my ex-husband. I’m sorry for the times I’ve been unloving, critical, angry, resentful, disrespectful, or unforgiving toward him. Help me to put aside any hurt, anger or disappointment I feel and forgive him the way you do – totally and completely, no looking back. Make me a tool of reconciliation, peace, and healing in this relationship. Enable us to communicate well and rescue us from the threshold of hurtful words and actions and disrespect where the realities of not seeing him as child of God exist.
Make me my ex-husband’s prayer support. Help me to create a peaceful spirit around us. Teach me how to take care of myself and stay healthy. Grow me into a creative and confident woman who is rich in mind, soul, and spirit. Make me the kind of woman that can rise above and love my ex-husband according to your will.
I lay all my expectations at your cross. I release my ex-husband from the burdens of any expectations where I should be looking to you. Help me accept him the way he is and not try to change him. I realize that in some way he may never change, but at the same time, I release him to change in ways I never thought he could. I leave all the changing that needs to be done in your hands, fully accepting that neither of us is perfect and never will be. Only you, oh Lord, are perfect and I look to you to perfect both of us.
Teach me how to pray for my ex-husband and make my prayer a true language of your love. Create new love for him. Show me how to love him and how to communicate it in a way he can clearly perceive it. Bring unity between us so we can be in agreement as parents who love our sons dearly. May the God of patience and comfort grant us to be like-minded as parents according to your holy will. Make us loving parents not pursuing separate, competitive or independent lives but working together, overlooking each other’s faults and weakness for the greater good of our sons. Help us pursue the things which make for peace in our new type of family. May we be joined together in the same because of the love we have for you and our children.
I pray that our commitment to you and to our sons grows stronger. Show us how to be respectful with each interaction. Help me to understand things from his perspective. Reveal to me what he wants and needs and show me potential problems before they arise. Breathe your life into my ex-husband, our sons, and me.
Make me a new ex-wife. Give me a fresh perspective, a positive outlook, and a renewed relationship with my ex-husband. Help me see him with new eyes, new appreciation, new compassion, and new acceptance. Give my ex-husband a new ex-wife in me.
Amen
Let me start by quoting Jeremiah 29:11. “For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.”
I thought it would be good to get grounded before thinking of any resolutions or goals for the new year. As you and I know, of all the people who make resolutions 8% are successful in achieving their results (based on research conducted by Statics Brain – see chart below). However, keep in mind that you are 10 times more likely to achieve your goals if you set one.
| News Years Resolution Statistics | Data |
| Percent of Americans who usually make New Year’s Resolutions | 45% |
| Percent of Americans who infrequently make New Year’s Resolutions | 17% |
| Percent of Americans who absolutely never make New Year’s Resolutions | 38% |
| Percent of people who are successful in achieving their resolution | 8% |
| Percent who have infrequent success | 49% |
| Percent who never succeed and fail on their resolution each year | 24% |
| People who explicitly make resolutions are 10 times more likely to attain their goals than people who don’t explicitly make resolutions |
I’d like to continue to help you increase your success rate by being faithful to yourself. Get rooted and grounded in God’s desire for you and read Jeremiah’s verse each morning. This can serve as an anchor for you when you are struggling. Just thinking of God’s love and gifts he has for you, may cause you to think about how you can continue to be open to receive and participate in his plan. From this place where you feel your value and self-worth, I also recommend the following:
1. Be clear and keep it simple. Little mantras like “Move-Consume-Express” are similar to advertising jingles that stick in our brains. You may find yourself becoming more creative and finding opportunities to incorporate more of this in your daily life.
2. Choose accountability partners. This is a sure way of increasing your ability to achieve your goal.
3. Change your space and surroundings to help support your actions.
4. Plan and schedule activities to help you establish routines and good habits to move you closer to where you want to be.
5. Be gentle with yourself for being human when you have made choices that are not aligned to your original goals. God will be gentle with you so there is no need to beat yourself up. This is an opportunity to learn more about yourself. I always say that it’s okay if you make a poor choice as long as you learn from it.
Remember you can always begin again, again and again. It’s not about arriving because it you arrive and have caused others misery, you have not been successful in living life as God desires of you. Your attitude will be key to achieving and living life while teaching your family how to make changes. Your increased happiness should extend to those around you if you do this right.
