The first year I remember making a New Year’s resolution was the year I turned nine.

I had seen some female bodybuilders on TV—solid masses of bronze, glowing, super-hero bodies in fluffy white bikinis and bleached hair—and I was fascinated by them. So while I sat at the kitchen table after dinner one night I asked my mom, “How much do you have to lift weights every day to become a body builder?”

“Oh, about an hour a day.”

“How long would it take a person to become a bodybuilder?”

“Oh, maybe a year.”

This struck me as remarkably doable. My mom had a set of little brown hand weights and a set of blue ones and I think she may have had the kind you velcro around your ankles. Probably a pound and a half or so. I would use those for an hour a day for a year, and I would be a bodybuilder by the time I was ten.

A new layer of oily, veiny, striated self seemed to be just the thing. Show up in elementary school with ESPN lady muscles bulging out of my lavender K-Mart back to school polo shirt and no one would say a word. Well, they would say words. But the words would bounce right off my biceps. Because I would have defied all the existing categories. I would have belonged to a world that the Hostess cupcake-eating elementary school kids would have no access to.

Unfortunately, beautiful as this dream was, it failed to materialize.

I don’t think I even made it to the traditional February 2nd. Thing is, the hand and ankle weights were a bit boring after about thirty seconds.

There is a part of me that, every six months or so, makes the equivalent of a nine-year-old’s resolution to become a bodybuilder: To put on some new aspect of being; to make myself impenetrable to—unassailable by—the hurts of the previous months; to prop myself up in some way; to create a new buffer between me and the cruel realities of existence in this world. They usually involve either running away somewhere or learning something new. A few examples: To quit my job and become a carnie. To quit my job and become a truck stop waitress somewhere in Indiana.To learn how to surf and go pro before the age of fifty. To quit my job and study auto-mechanics. To quit my job and go live off the land somewhere and start an organic chicken farm.

But then there was the year I resolved to find my way back to God.

This stands out in my memory as the only resolution I ever kept. And the thing is, I didn’t keep it: He did.

After many years of believing with all my heart—staking my whole life on it—I was struggling to believe in the basic tenets of Christianity. I wasn’t deciding not to believe; I was slipping into unbelief, flowing into it naturally, as one goes with the flow of traffic or as rainwater flows down the sides of the street into the gutter. My whole life conspired to take me with this flow, so that it seemed natural—Providential, even (ironically)—to let it take me where it would.

The turning point came in a quiet monastery one Christmas Eve amid brothers and sisters dressed in gray, chanting in front of a nativity scene.

I knelt awkwardly in my heavy winter boots, and I felt that familiar rise of incredulity in my throat, the flow of my thoughts leading me to an inevitable loss of faith and a concomitant despair.

But what I also felt was my sin. And my misery in my sin.

My sins were not more exotic than usual. I wasn’t doing anything at the time that your average Christian would call “living in sin.” But I could feel the smallness of my heart—like that scene in the original Grinch that Stole Christmas where you learn that the Grinch’s heart is three sizes too small—and no amount of hand-holding Christmas sentimentality was going to make it grow.

As I looked at the tiny plastic doll in the manger—barely able to believe that God became flesh and dwelt among us—I nevertheless wanted to make room in my small, dark heart for the baby Jesus—the star of Bethlehem—the angelic host—the light of God—the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. I felt that I could not fix my small heart with psychology, with reading Aristotle, with positive affirmations.

So I resolved to find my way back to Him.

Over the next few days I delineated my plan: I would embrace the things I was running away from, the things that made me feel at odds with God, namely, the current detritus of contemporary Christian culture. I would force myself to listen to the angry preachers on Christian radio. I would force myself to go to church, no matter how cheesy the music, no matter how dumb the church sign, no matter how much I cried in the parking lot because of some triggering words in the sermon, or because no one said “hi” to me that morning.

And I would come back to this monastery a couple of days a week at six AM when the monks sat silent with their hoods over their heads.

I was only slightly more faithful with the specifics of this resolution than I was with those of the body-building one. But it turns out that, in this case, my intent was enough: God himself saw me walking the Prodigal’s road home and came to me in leaps and bounds and into my life came a new flow of Providence. People who said the things I needed to hear. People who talked me through my struggles and hangups. A book or two. The right song with the right line at the right time. And yes, even the sermons of the preachers on the radio seemed to ring with new truth and hope and kindness and the harsh tones and condemnation quieted down.

This restoration unfolded gently—naturally—beautifully—slow and sure as a plant grows and leans toward the sun—over the course of a year or so, so that when Christmastime came around again, it struck me that what I had experienced was the reality of the Incarnation in my own life: Christ had come—in the flesh—that is, in my mundane earthly experience—to meet with me.

Many years later, I still struggle with some of the same sins. I still feel the smallness of my own heart, and as I grow older, I live with many regrets: that I did things I shouldn’t have done; that I did not do the good I could have done.

And I still struggle with some of the same human hangups that impelled me to make my bodybuilding resolution as a nine-year-old. I would like to be impervious to hurt, to the taunts on the playground, somehow to live outside of the conventional categories so that I won’t be subject to their scales of justice, to their rating system, to the score they (whoever “they” are) place on the performance of my life.

In short, I would like to be insulated from failure, from mediocrity, from rejection.

Unfortunately I look back over years of resolutions and attempts to improve and help myself and I see the futility of these schemes and efforts.

Fortunately, the Incarnation is still true: Jesus still shows up and does things and changes things and moves things around, often in spite of my efforts.

Yes, I have a list of resolutions this year that may or may not involve a gym membership, or, alternatively, lots of tap dancing.

But the best thing I can do, in the small, dark, limitedness of my heart, is to make room for Jesus once more.

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This testimony first appeared in Kosmeo Magazine as “Body-Building and the Nativity,” in the December 2022 / January 2023 issue.

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Jessamyn Rains is a mother of small children who writes and makes music. Her writing appears or is forthcoming in various publications, including Amethyst Review, Trampoline, and Reformation Journal. She lives with her family in Tennessee.

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