A picture etched on my mind looks like this: I’m sitting in a southern church with my 90 year old mother, on the second row, so that she can hear and see every part of the service. The sermon is on being willing to move out of comfort to change.

At the end of the teaching, Mother gets up with effort, holding onto her cane so she can walk to the front of the church in response to the call for commitment. I am almost embarrassed as she joins the sinners, the zealous youth, and hard-core status quo that finally see the need to change. Thinking that she did not hear the sermon well, I lean over to explain that she does not need to take the few steps to the front of the church. She has raised 11 children, helped start churches and taught the Bible all over the world. With that kind of badge—plus ninety years of a good and pure life—I figured she was exempt from any more altar calls for the rest of her life.

She smiles, gently shrugs my hand off of her arm and makes the faltering steps to join the small army of new recruits at the speaker’s podium. I watch while she weeps out her prayers and ask her later why she was so moved by what sounded to me like a pretty standard sermon.

“I need to change, Mary,” says the ninety-year-old wise, warrior woman.

Her words turn out to be the sermon I hear that night. I hear them again during the first month of the New Year that is already aging. I need to change. Sermons seldom change us (a depressing thought to those of us who give them) and new resolutions barely live to May or June. Well lived lives on the other hand are powerful blueprints to follow into the unknown, to where we have never been before.

Identifying what crusty habit or hardened grudge or unbending personality trait that needs to be redeemed, transformed and well, changed in us is a first step to not living out another year with baggage that weighs us down too low to try to fly. How in the world are our relationships going to get better, our ministries more integrity grounded, our impact on this world more powerful unless we see our need and pursue change?

Here’s a thought. How about going into the next months refusing to dwell on how everyone else needs to change (although God and we both know they do!) How about you and me finding our way to that place of humble confession and starting there; “I need to change. Thank God there’s still time for us to be what we’ve never been before, do what we’ve only dreamed about, and go beyond the borders of our own fear. It all lies on the other side of personal change.