Happy New Year All!

When pondering what New Year’s related song I could post here, I considered Bing Crosby’s Let’s Start the New Year Right and the playful video I featured in last year’s post.

But more than anything else that came to mind, Matisyahu’s Live Like a Warrior encapsulates what I wish for others in the New Year. Please join me in cranking up the video above and letting yesterday burn in the fire.

While I always wish for hope, peace, truth, justice, and for people to come as they are to the Savior, this year I specifically want people to find the freedom to be themselves. Too many of us, for far too long, have lived within the prison walls of how other people want us to define our lives, or act, or speak, or dress. It’s time to break those chains and start living out loud as the unique, beloved, talented children of the Creator that we really are.

If I want to eat cornflakes at midnight dressed in a Spongebob Snuggie while watching ’60s Godzilla movies, I’m going to do it. Well, maybe I already do. But more than that, I want us all to be tired of toiling in the shade of jobs that don’t utilize our abilities, in unnecessary relationships that sap our sanity, and simply existing in a world that instead needs passionate warriors to beat back the rising tide of hatred and evil.

It’s time to be who we really are, people. You know full well that there is a dream inside you, a seed planted by the One Who made you and knows you, waiting to spring out into the light. It isn’t just a fantasy. It is a spark waiting to be fanned into an inferno. You are more than your past. You are more than your present. You’ve been purposely placed here now, at this time, to do the most good you can do in the time that you have with the gifts that you have been given.

As Marcus Aurelius said, what we do now… echoes in eternity. This new year, my prayer is that we all wake up from our slumber and come alive like never before, daring to accomplish mighty feats that others think are just plain crazy. Let’s stop worrying about what other flawed human beings think and start growing into our true selves as the Creator intended. When you look back, do you really want to say that you spent your time on earth in safe mode, or in OH YEAH! BRING IT ON! mode?

Dance when you want to dance. Sing when you want to sing. Love with reckless abandon, take a stand for justice, defend the poor and oppressed. Do that thing that only you can do. And someday, a long time from now, in another place, we’ll look back and celebrate the day that each of us decided to shed our scaly cloaks of human opinion and started letting our true selves shine. God never intended you to pretend to be less than you really are.

Live like a warrior.

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©2014 H. Hiatt/wildninjablog.com. All articles/posts on this blog are copyrighted original material that may not be reproduced in part or whole in any electronic or printed medium without prior permission from H. Hiatt/wildninjablog.com.