The five of us sat in a dimly-lit room around candles that symbolized the year. 12 little tea lights, one for each month. One flame out, and one relit for the new year.

“Remember when you didn’t come to the beach house because you didn’t want to be seen in a bathing suit?” she said, and we all laughed. July’s flame flickered slowly before we nodded our heads and she leaned in to whisper it out.

“That was the month he died,” another says softly, and we pause with grief. “I’m happy to see September go.” The flame goes out with a quick breath.

A whole year of stories, of life lived, of dreams realized, hearts broken and hopes renewed. With each candle snuffed out, we said goodbye to the year lived. Tabula Rasa, it’s called. Clean slate. New things. Journal pages wide open with hope and we prayed in the new year with honesty, new dreams, new fears.

As 2011 closes the door quickly behind us, 2012 looms large, unwritten, unlived. There is a part of me that wants to take solace in resolutions. I want to give myself a list of ways I should improve my life. Surely, this could be the year I muscle up enough strength to lose that extra weight. Organize my closets. Put all those random photos in photo albums. Pay off that debt.

I want to prove to myself that I can be a better person this year than I was last year. It’s so funny to me, how as much as I want to say I’m relying fully on Christ, it’s so easy to pick up my own baggage at the beginning of the year.

“This will be the year,” I bravely tell myself in the morning. But will it? And if it isn’t, is that ok? I look back at the year that just kissed me farewell and I see 12 months of proof that my own resolve was nothing without Grace. I made a lot of mistakes last year. I also adventured quite a bit. With a three-year-old on my hip, I moved across the country. I said goodbye to some dreams. I opened my heart to some new ones.

But most important, it was a whole year of learning (all over again) that all the bad, all the good, all my worst behavior, all my best behavior — it doesn’t measure up to the work of the Gospel in me. In fact, it’s all meaningless compared to the work of Grace.

Common culture wants us to believe that we are somehow our own superheroes. That we get to be the main character of our stories. That, should we decide to muster up enough willpower, we can check off lists, change our families, change our legacies. The problem with this is by mid-March, our human will begins to wane (for some sooner, for others later.) We were never meant to be the heroes of our stories. Jesus is.

If the success of 2012 was left to sheer willpower alone, I’m ready to throw in the towel now. Because I can make it look like I have will power, but deep down, I know that without the “anchor of our hope” holding this ship steady, I will eventually crash it into some rocky shoreline. I’m looking ahead at a year of elections, political debates, probably more natural disasters — a whole world that is bursting at the seams, waiting for redemption. If I can’t admit that I, we, this world desperately needs Christ, every single day, then I’m missing the point of the gospel.

This year, we can make one resolution — rely on the finished work of Christ. Let this be the year we open up blank journals, blow out candles, and let go of baggage that was never ours to carry. Andrea Levendusky writes and designs for The Organic Bird, theorganicbird.com. She lives, dreams and drinks coffee in Rochester, NY with her three-year-old daughter, Madeleine.