There is something sweet and sacred and enchanting about a new year, because it feels like a brand new start.

Every year we make our goals for this wiped clean slate, as a family, as a partnership, as individuals, and I feel so hopeful and excited for all we want to see and do and accomplish in the next 365 days.

And yet, something about the year’s end feels disappointing and difficult.

Maybe it doesn’t feel that way, really, until we look back at those last year’s goals, the ones that should have been met but weren’t, because of job changes or children challenges or just no energy left at the end of long days.

Not much turned out like we thought it would, and regret can eat a whole year out of history.

So much left undone. So much we want to do still. So much that feels impossible.

These endings hold evaluations in their hands, like there is some invisible bar of accomplishment we must reach before we can stamp the whole last year successful.

Have I done enough? Have I measured up? Have I met all those goals, or at least most of them?

Have I done anything noteworthy at all?

What if the answer is no?

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At 16 years old, I had already made it my goal to be the first woman president of the United States.

I wasn’t really interested in government or politics, but I was interested in improving the world, and so I made my plan to major in government studies and then go to law school and practice long enough at a good firm to make a name for myself, so I could then become a Senator.

An election as a state representative would set me on the path toward presidency, because people would see that I was concerned with issues like environmental preservation and education and peace among our foreign brothers and sisters.

In 25 years or fewer, I thought, I would be a shoe-in.

Except when I sat down and really, really thought about it, politics wasn’t what I wanted to do with the rest of my life, because my heart turned wildly toward writing.

But I was class president and had a tiny taste of the importance granted one who leads a student body. Or a country. The way “they” looked at me when I talked president was not the same way “they” looked at me when I talked writer.

I wanted to be significant. Important. Known.

I wanted to be respected and revered and loved.

At the very heart of that president plan was the need to be somebody who did something people would remember.

To be someone noteworthy.

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The need haunts me even now.

It finds its way into New Year’s goals and stands on the wall between the new and old, shaking its head at the whole last year that looks the opposite of noteworthy.

We always start with good intentions, there at the beginning of the year, and then the months roll on, and there are sicknesses and unexpected setbacks and the day-to-day drowning in the needs of five, going on six, boys eight years and younger.

The end of my years, since becoming a parent, look a lot like this one, with more goals left undone than done, and there are words that stand on repeat like a scratched up CD playing background music for a ring-in-the-New-Year party.

You accomplished nothing of value this year. Absolutely nothing.

No nursing home visits with the family. No published book (yet). Not even a weekly date night with the man I love.

And maybe there were other things we did in this year of finding our feet with toddler twins and getting all kids out of diapers, at least until February, and learning more about playing than just existing, but nothing feels all that remarkable.

The whole year? Did we fail the whole year? Because what do we have to show for it?

A few more gray hairs and too many more tired-lines around our eyes.

We all want to do something grand and noble and significant, and what if this is it?

What if writing rough-draft words in a journal and mopping up puke and doing eight loads of laundry every week so it can sit on a banister waiting to be put away is all the great we can do?

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The summer before my sophomore year of college, I signed up to go on a mission trip to Mexico, along with the people from my home church and those from another small church in town.

I had only been once before, but this summer was important. For the last few months I’d entertained the glamorous notion of being a full-time overseas missionary, and I thought another trip would help solidify my certainty.

Some team members conducted eye exams for the poorest in a rural town, and a dentist checked teeth while a doctor probed babies.

My job was helping run a Vacation Bible School for the children while their parents stood in line to receive services and health information.

The children loved us. When our van would pull away from the stone-walled Baptist church with no-glass-paned windows, they would run alongside us, waving and blowing kisses.

I cried every time we left, because my heart was tender, and I knew the look of poverty, since I wore it, too, though nothing like theirs.

During those days, I expected a big voice to tell me that this was it. This was what I had been created to do.

Instead, I got a parasite.

It happened the night church members in Mexico decided to cook for us. We were warned by our more experienced travelers to take it easy, since our stomachs weren’t used to the Mexico water and other cooking ingredients.

All those other teammates, though, took one of those sugar cones filled with dulce de leche candy, so I thought surely it would be OK if I did, too.

I was sick, nonstop, for two days, and I got so dehydrated I could hardly climb from bed. I lay in a kind of reverie, where I saw a stage and a microphone and a pen and a notebook, and nothing made the least bit of sense, and the next thing I knew they were half-carrying me to one of the vans, loading me with Gatorade and water, even though every time I drank something I just threw it all back up, and then we were on our way home.

I didn’t know until later, until the parasite had worked its way out and I was one week into my two-weeks-of-just-broth diet, what those visions meant.

I wanted full-time missionary because it was significant and holy and good.

Yet there was another path for my life that I could not see until I almost died (or at least felt like I was dying). Writer. Musician. Creator.

I told myself I would never do something again just because it felt important.

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And yet here I am, at the end of my year, disappointed that I have not done anything, or much, important in all those 365 days of potential.

So what if I haven’t, by the world’s standards?

So what if I have nothing more to show at the end of a year than a house that is still standing even though it is home to five, going on six, boys, even though it bears their holes in just about every wall, even though there is a layer of dirt caked on everything that lives inside?

So what if I have nothing more to show at the end of a year than a man who still loves me tenderly, the way I still love him?

So what if I have nothing more to show at the end of a year than ten writing notebooks filled with essays and musings and a novel or two that still wait for publication?

Sometimes I forget that the noteworthy I can do happens right here in this very moment.

In every moment.

Change the world, that’s our goal, and we see that mess politics has made of our nation, and we say, “Yes. There. That’s where I want to change the world,” because it’s grand to stand for what we believe in.

Change the world, and we see those bloated bellies of babies and the wounded eyes of windows and the dirty water they’re all drinking, and we say, “Yes. There. That’s where I can change the world,” because it’s noble to feed orphans and comfort widows and meet needs.

Change the world, and we think of all those thousands of people reading the words of others that are published into bound, physical pages, and we whisper it soft. “Here, too. Let me change the world here.”

And all this while, we are already changing the world, right this very minute.

Sometimes changing the world looks like putting a 2-year-old back in his bed for the four thousandth time and kissing that mouth and repeating, with more patience than we really feel, that he is not to get out of bed again.

Sometimes changing the world looks like reading Magic Tree House books with the 5-year-old, because he’s just finding his confidence with chapter books.

Sometimes changing the world looks like building a Lego Star Wars ship with the 8-year-old, because he can’t find all the pieces that are sitting in plain view on his worktable.

I can make myself feel bad about not sending out those publishing letters or not looking for those mission opportunities or not lobbying the government for what I find important, but I have changed the world right here within the walls of my home.

Changing the world of one person, or five littles, still changes the whole world.

We will ring in the new year in three days, and we will fall forward into all the moments it has to offer and leave behind all those used-up moments of the last year.

I hope, in our falling, we will trade the self-named failure of yesterday for the mantra of Mother Teresa today:

“Let us do something beautiful for God.”

Because we have done something beautiful, and we will again.