I’m writing this the morning of January 1, 2010 — I usually write ahead of time around here, but I thought for this one, I’d just do it the morning of.

Happy new year! It’s 2010. Wow. In the year 2000, I guess I would’ve been 16. As I recall, we spent the end of 1999 at the school my parents were missionaries at. Worried. “What’s going to happen with Y2k?” was the thought on everyone’s mind. I won’t recall for you that, at that young age, I had figured out that pretty much nothing was going to happen. I think this was because, at the time, I was a mac user, and Macs didn’t have the Y2k bug. My data was incomplete, but my conclusion was correct.

I digress: it’s now ten years later. This is really the first decade that I can remember all of in detail. College… Marriage… Jobs… Immigrating… a first child. It’s been a busy ten years. It’s been a great ten years.

In our household, there’s a little bit of a practice we’ve been doing since our first new years as a married couple. On New Years eve, we try to write a little bit about the year that has passed — big events, little events, happy events, sad events. It’s just a little “where we are as a family” that helps us to remember what the Lord has been doing with us. It’s fun to look back over those things, to get a reminder of happy things and a challenge from themes that arise again and again.

This year, we had a little extra help concocting it: Michael Hyatt published a blog post that included 7 questions to help review the year that has gone by. I’ll reprint the basic list, but he has more detail to help over at his blog.

If the last year were a movie of your life, what would the genre be?

What were the two or three major themes that kept recurring?

What did you accomplish this past year that you are the most proud of?

What do you feel you should have been acknowledged for but weren’t?

What disappointments or regrets did you experience this past year?

What was missing from last year as you look back?

What were the major life-lessons you learned this past year?

Helpful questions, and questions that will be fun to come back to. May your new year be blessed, may your love for the Father grow deeper, and may he be gracious to you.