For the past several years I have chosen a single word to be my word. The first year it was Focus. Last year it was Joy. This year my word is Grace. I started pondering my 2017 word before Christmas. There were a lot of words that went through my mind – strength, love, breathe, journey – too many actually. I had to stop thinking about it and wait until it presented itself to me. Then came New Year’s Eve.

Sometime midway through 2016 my crazy English friend had made a comment that we should burn 2016 in effigy on New Year’s Eve. It’s been that kind of year so the idea stuck and we spent a quiet New Year’s Eve with my friend and her family. It was exactly what I needed. We had Chinese take out for dinner and played games. She presented each of us with a card that had 2016 on the front and 2017 on the back and these instructions: on the 2016 side write the things you didn’t like or wish didn’t happen, then write your goals on the 2017 side. We put the 2017 side into an envelope to hold until next New Year’s Eve. 2016 was burned in the fireplace along with a bit of sage.

As I pondered my goals for 2017 I found myself mentally adding the words “with grace” to the end of each one. While going about my day on January 1st I kept running into that word, grace, again and again. Someone’s trying to tell me something. So I looked it up in the dictionary (ok, dictionary.com).  There are 15 different definitions of grace, go ahead and look it up for yourself. My two favorites are:

1. favor or goodwill
2. moral strength

The first one includes the synonyms kindness, kindliness, and love. That’s what I want for my year. I want to execute all things in 2017 with goodwill, kindness, love, and moral strength.

Grace.