Rethinking the New Year
Historically, the new year was about alignment, order, and faithfulness under God.
Men began the year by asking, “Am I rightly ordered?”—not “How can I optimize my life?”
New years once meant repentance, renewed commitments, and recalibration...
Not reinvention, self-hacking, or chasing productivity for its own sake.
The focus was on faithfulness to the life and responsibilities God had entrusted.
Modern culture has shifted the question.
Today, it’s all about self-engineering, habit stacking, and optimization.
We’re told we can architect every area of our lives if we just apply the right system.
The problem is, systems cannot substitute for order, alignment, and stewardship.
Optimization without alignment produces anxiety and exhaustion.
The truth is simple: your starting point is more important than your system.
Start with your identity. Start with your stewardship.
Ask: “What has God entrusted to me to faithfully tend this year?”
Faithfulness comes before fruit. Order comes before progress. Alignment comes before momentum.
When you start here, everything else—work, health, relationships—falls into place.
This year, don’t chase optimization. Reclaim the older, wiser rhythm:
Examine your life under God, renew your commitments, and tend your domains faithfully.
Align first. Then get to work.
Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting. —Psalm 139:23–24
Get Dominion,
