how do you sustain your epiphany?

Sunday was the Feast of Epiphany, and yesterday was the Baptism of the Lord, all in the Roman liturgical calendar. According to Merriam Webster, epiphany means:

a(1) : a usually sudden manifestation or perception of the essential nature or meaning of something

(2) : an intuitive grasp of reality through something (such as an event) usually simple and striking

(3) : an illuminating discovery, realization, or disclosure

b : a revealing scene or moment

So many of us have an “epiphany” on New Year’s Eve and make resolutions for the new year. By the end of January, most of them have fallen by the wayside. We’ve put ourselves into another year of stasis. Then, we complain that our resolutions failed, and why bother, and resolutions don’t mean anything anyway.

That epiphany was a moment of potential change, a moment of anger, of frustration. We chose to use that moment to set big hairy audacious goals without realizing that our ability to change is very weak if we’re not used to changing things in our lives.

Think of change as water wearing down the earth over millions of years to create the Grand Canyon. Daily, small drops of water did their thing until the power of accumulative action created the amazing work of nature we know today.

As a Catholic, I know that I am a broken person. I battle between my weak human nature and my desire to love sacrificially. If I relied on my human nature to make healthy changes in my life, I would fail repeatedly. Motivation does not lead to action. Action leads to motivation.

So take your epiphany and start really small. Do something you can succeed at doing daily whether it’s drinking a glass of water at each meal, parking your car farther out to walk a few more steps to work, or reading 5 paragraphs of a book. Do one small thing for 30 days. Then, do an additional small thing for another 30 days.

Don’t waste that epiphany with another year of growing older yet no better than you were the year before.