It’s that time of year: Christmas has come and gone, and we look forward to a brand-new year. What will 2026 hold? Maybe many good things. Perhaps some challenges and disappointments. We don’t know. What we do know is that, with God’s grace, will be able to face whatever life has in store.   

This is also the time when many of us make resolutions for the New Year. Perhaps we want to lose weight or overcome a bad habit. We may want to increase our spiritual life with more prayer, more Scripture reading, more church attendance, and so on. Maybe we’d like to improve or restore some of our relationships. Or perhaps we’d like to accomplish a goal that has eluded us or that we haven’t taken time to complete.  

All these things are great ideas for new year resolutions, and there are a thousand more things we could choose. As we come to the end of our Weekly Reflections on humility, perhaps we can make a New Year’s resolution to increase this virtue in our lives in 2026.   

Doing so can include all the things mentioned above. Improving our health, our spiritual life, and our relationships will also help us to know ourselves better and to see ourselves more as God sees us – that is the very definition of humility. It is a worthy goal for the New Year.  

In taking on this or any resolution, we must be persistent. Often, a week or two into January, we will realize that we have fallen short of keeping our resolutions. WE MUST NOT GIVE UP. Building any virtue takes effort and we cannot give up on the goal because we don’t accomplish it perfectly on the first try. God will help us if we strive to cooperate with His grace.   

This week, as we consider our new year resolutions, let us also promise ourselves that we will pick ourselves up when we fall, dust ourselves off and try again.