And like that, it’s a new year! Look, I’m not much of a write-down-formal-goals-or-resolutions person, but I have some things I’d like to accomplish this year, and thought it would be fun to hear what you’re planning on. This isn’t an exhaustive list, of course, but here are four things I want to do this year:
- Improve my Spanish and Portuguese
In mid-2022, Texas began sending refugees and asylees to Chicago. One of the shelters the city has provided for recent arrivals is about three blocks from our church building, and by October or November, Central and South American immigrants began attending our ward. A couple friends organized a Sunday School class in Spanish, and English classes after church and on Wednesdays, for the immigrants. My wife, who speaks a little Spanish, decided to attend. I served a mission in Brazil a couple decades ago, and took two years of high school Spanish, so I started attending too. (Originally, missionaries from one of the Spanish wards started attending our ward on Sundays too; then, maybe six months ago, the mission president assigned Spanish-speaking Elders to our ward, and they have been wonderful.)
I’ve been using Duolingo (and conversing with people) to improve my Spanish, and recently started also working to ramp up my Portuguese. I’m planning on continuing to improve them both in 2024.
- Improve my saxophone
My freshman year of college, I was a saxophone performance major. For all sorts of reasons, that’s not what I ended up graduating in. But just before the pandemic hit, I picked up my sax again. And now I’m working on jazz tenor and classical soprano (and, for the heck of it, fusion/funk EWI). This year, I want to get in the kind of shape on each that I can play comfortably publicly (which may also involve getting my soul jazz band together more frequently and possibly finding three others to form a saxophone quartet).
- Read the Book of Mormon with a focus on care for the stranger and refugee
I mentioned some of the scriptures’ focus on refugees in my last post. And migration is absolutely central to the Book of Mormon. As we read it for Sunday School this year, I really want to dig into what it says about migration and care for migrants.
- Publish my book
Just as everything shut down for the holidays, I sent a final draft of my book on Mormonism and taxation to my editor at the University of Illinois Press. I’m really excited to be able to share it (hopefully in the near future, though the mills of academic publishing sometimes grind slowly). I’ll post more on it here as we get closer to publication, but in the meantime, I’ll be working this year to push it toward completion.
So those are some of my plans/goals/resolutions for 2024. I’d love to hear what you’re hoping to do, accomplish, or even survive this year, it you’re willing to share.
And happy New Year!
Photo by Sincerely Media on Unsplash