Whether you believe in making New Year's resolutions or not, there’s a good discussion to be had with your children on goals and change at the beginning of a new year. Here is a fun lesson plan for a brand new year.
Begin the lesson singing Hymn #217, "Come Let Us Anew."
Come, let us anew our journey pursue,
Roll round with the year,
And never stand still till the Master appear.
His adorable will let us gladly fulfill,
And our talents improve
By the patience of hope and the labor of love.
Our life as a dream, our time as a stream
Glide swiftly away,
And the fugitive moment refuses to stay;
For the arrow is flown and the moments are gone.
The millennial year
Presses on to our view, and eternity's here.
Oh, that each in the day of His coming may say,
"I have fought my way thru;
I have finished the work thou didst give me to do."
Oh, that each from his Lord may receive the glad word:
"Well and faithfully done;
Enter into my joy and sit down on my throne.
Read the notated scriptures (Matthew 25:21 and 2 Timothy 4:7-8) and discuss phrases in the hymn and the purpose of life. You may or may not wish to use the words of the hymn as copywork.
Next, ask what is a resolution? It's a firm decision to do or not do something.
I love Calvin & Hobbes and have shared that with my kids. Over the 10 years of the comic strip, Bill Watterson almost always did a New Year’s bit (missed 2 when he took a couple of sabbaticals) and he’s hit the philosophy of pretty much every person through the course of it. So, I printed out all of the New Years strips and we read them and talked about the different ways of thinking. We compared them with what we think and believe the gospel teaches, recognizing that at some point most everyone experiences the range of emotions that Calvin expresses from frustration to apathy to hope..
After reading the comics, have your children summarize the ideas being presented about resolutions and change. List them on a whiteboard. (Examples include “I don’t want to change.” “Why do I need to change?” “Everyone else needs to change.”)
Calvin raises the point that every year our problems seem bigger than what one person’s resolutions can change. It’s pointless. Introduce the following poem:
“Your task? To build a better world,” God said.
I answered, “How?
“The world is such a large, vast place—
“So complicated now.
“And I so small and useless am,
“There’s nothing I can do.”
But God, in His great wisdom, said,
“Just build a better you.”
How is Zion built? One heart at a time. How do we change the world? One person at a time. Challenge everyone to memorize the poem.
The great thing about Calvin is that as he over-reacts and exaggerates in embracing things we might think but never say; we get to see through him the fallacy in the negative. In these comics, Calvin embraces the natural man. No matter what you think of making resolutions, you must realize the truth in Mosiah 3:19, that the natural man is an enemy to God, unless he changes:
"For the natural man is an enemy to God, and has been from the fall of Adam, and will be, forever and ever, unless he yields to the enticings of the Holy Spirit, and putteth off the natural man and becometh a saint through the atonement of Christ the Lord, and becometh as a child, submissive, meek, humble, patient, full of love, willing to submit to all things which the Lord seeth fit to inflict upon him, even as a child doth submit to his father."
Where Calvin complains of change being hard, uncomfortable, perhaps harmful, and sometimes painful, the Book of Mormon teaches us that change is necessary and something to desire. (See Mosiah 5:7, Helaman 15:7, Alma 5:12.) Discuss people in the Book of Mormon who changed, such as Alma the Younger, Lamoni, the Anti-Nephi-Lehies.
What does the Book of Mormon teach us brings change? Faith and repentance.
Finally, read Isaiah 1:18:
"Come now, and let us reason together, saith the Lord: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool."
And that brings us to the very last Calvin and Hobbes strip that Bill Watterson penned, published December 31, 1995. The final strip was number 3,150. Though I wish it hadn’t ended, I think he finished it well. This final strip exhibits how I like to look at each new year.
