Progress Is The Plot
A Sacred Alternative to New Year’s Resolutions
I’m making progress. I’m becoming. A bit more each year. I emerge from within. Discovering more of me after all these years. The calendar turns and I do too. I turn older; wiser. I turn into something closer to what I’m meant to be. I’m making progress.
I’m doing a long, slow, re-reading of the Bible right now. I’m enjoying it. Reading a sacred text like this helps me zoom out and ask, “What is the big point of all this?”
I very often find inspiration in the characters, the verses, the micro-stories, and the symbolism in specific sections of the Bible. But without zooming out every once in a while, we can miss the forest for the trees, I think.
It baffles me how so many people can zoom way way in on a handful of specific lines out of this giant tome and think they’ve found a truth in just a sentence or two pulled out of context that is strong enough to validate violence and abuse. Verses have cursed us, but the full story holds glory.
When we zoom in too far, we turn anecdotes into verdicts.
When we zoom in too close, we confuse a chapter with the ending.
When we mistake a verse for the whole story, we start hurting people… including ourselves.
But this is true of our lives too, isn’t it?
I can zoom way way in on some particular aspect of my last year and obsess over it. And my tunnel vision will blind me to the larger truth of my life.
Maybe I believe the tale my bathroom scale told about me last year.
Maybe I had one moment last year—some thoughtless comment or humiliating moment—that I’m embarrassed by and I can’t let it go.
Maybe I messed up and damaged a relationship.
Maybe I screwed up at work.
Maybe I didn’t volunteer as much as I wanted to.
Maybe I just completely failed at my New Year’s resolutions.
And so I’ll go into the next year hyper-focused on some micro-aspect of my life… only to miss the bigger story… the story of my becoming.
These tiny aspects don’t define me, they are simply tiny words and sentences in my long, beautiful book of life.
In my long, slow re-read of the Bible, I’m discovering again that it is really a long story of progress and change. It is a long narrative, an epic, a saga about an evolving, transforming, ever-emerging relationship between humans and the divine.
I think it is really a story about love emerging into the world a little more fully each year.
To see it as a stagnant set of unchanging rules seems to miss the whole point. To zoom in on a tiny line or a single verse without the greater context seems to be dangerous. To be nearsighted while examining a broad, wide, vast story of emergence seems immature and small-minded.
Progress is the plot.
Progress. Not the kind of progress that is measured against some finite, concrete ideal… but the kind of progress that emerges, and becomes, and is revealed continually. An eternal unveiling. A divine progress with no limits and an infinite page count.
And in our lives this coming year, maybe progress is the part of our own stories we should zoom out and notice.
For ourselves. And for each other.
Seeing the whole story as love, becoming, and progress, allows us to consider forgiveness for the sentences and phrases that have hurt.
Understanding the plot as one that slowly bends toward justice, invites our courageous grace to reflect the potency of God’s.
Zooming out and seeing the big, divine story makes the little stuff in our lives seem so predictably… human. And aren’t we allowed to be human?
Make progress the plot of your upcoming year. And if possible, patiently allow for progress to emerge in the lives of the people in your life. Love is the ultimate storyline. Love is the underlying message. Love is the white space between the words and paragraphs, and it is the margin we’re meant to provide each other and ourselves.
Love emerges more each year. And so may we. Amen.
QUESTIONS FOR CONTEMPLATION & DISCUSSION
Where are you most tempted to zoom in on a single sentence of your life right now—and what might you notice if you zoomed out to see the larger story of your becoming?
(This could be a moment, a mistake, a number, a label, or a belief you’ve been carrying.)When have you mistaken a chapter for the ending—either in your own life or in how you’ve understood someone else’s story?
How did that narrow view shape your compassion, patience, or self-talk?What does “progress” mean for you when it’s not measured by achievement, perfection, or comparison—but by emergence, love, and growth over time?
Where do you already see signs of that kind of progress, even if it feels incomplete?If love is the underlying plot of the story—of Scripture, of humanity, of your own life—what margin of grace might you need to offer yourself or someone else this year?
What would it look like to let love, rather than judgment, interpret the story as it continues to unfold?