You're listening to the Allender Center podcast with Dr. Dan Allender.

This week, Dan talks about how to begin a new year with care and intentionality.

As we dream about everything 2016 has in store, Dan invites us to approach this year by taking stock of our major plans,

identifying core themes, and returning to by taking stock of our major plans, identifying core themes,

and returning to the central calling of our lives, a call to join God's ongoing work of healing and restoration. I hope it was an excellent Christmas season for you. And as you have come to end the year and

perhaps considered some of the podcast on ending, it's a natural beginning to say,

Happy New Year. And may it be 2016, really the year of the Lord's favor.

And the question, how can we make this year as good and sweet and profitable as humanly

possible?

I think it requires some of the same care that I invited you to attend to with regard

to how you have lived in the year 2015. In some ways, as we begin this podcast on how to begin the

year well, it really, in some ways, depends to some degree on how well you ended the year.

And I don't mean by that how good a Christmas it was or how could your presents were received

or that you've only put yourself in moderate amount of debt.

There are a lot of elements to determining how a year ends. But as I tried to put words

to three stages, first stage being where you collect the data and you allow yourself then to

ponder it, you're starting to look at what captures your heart, your eyes. As I went through the data of our last year, one of the things

I did was just asked the question, what was the sweetest experience of the year? And it came quickly,

and that was a three-day camping trip. My wife and I took into Mount Baker and the Mount Baker Wilderness.

Again, what we did was so unimportant other than we hung out together in a tent.

It rained a lot.

We read a book together.

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