IN THEORY:What do you resolve for the new year?

As a spiritual leader, what is your New Year's resolution for 2007?

Everything happens for a reason.

The fact that my article of last week was not published in the paper (though it appeared on the website) due to "space limitations" prompts my answer to this week's question: I resolve to gracefully and gratefully accept limitations.

This is not a craven surrender to the narrowing of possibilities that each passing year renders more palpable but an embrace of the wisdom that God is the Creator while we are the creation. The universe does not advance on my timetable or in line with my expectations, but according to God's calculation and his unassailable sovereignty. It is the Lord's speech out of the whirlwind, identifying Job as a powerless latecomer, that resonates within me. The Biblical text that seems ever more applicable to me is from Ecclesiastes: "I know that everything God does will endure forever; nothing can be added to it and nothing taken from it." I conclude that any further expectation of God's seeking my counsel before he acts will continue to be in vain.

It is incumbent upon me to initiate, but not up to me to achieve. I must exert my best effort, but results are the province of God. I can throw my best pitch, but whether it arrives in the strike zone and how the umpire judges it are beyond my power to control. Moses did not cross over the Jordan. David did not build the Temple. Schubert did not finish his Eighth Symphony. Kafka did not complete "The Castle." Wilson did not create a League of Nations. But it was their determination that revealed their character and their striving that endowed blessing.

We reach the end with dreams unrealized, projects not completed, resolutions unfulfilled. As the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. said, "One of the great agonies of life is that we are constantly trying to finish that which is unfinishable." This is because only God succeeds in everything he sets out to do, while we do not succeed ultimately in anything we set out to do.