A New Year message from Father Gary Waddington at St Wilfrid's Harrogate

Perhaps it’s Dry January. Maybe it’s a new weight-loss plan. This might be the year in which you finally complete…

These are, of course, virtuous aims. They’re noble. And, I say with personal experience, most are doomed to failure.

By the end of the first week of January, the diet has gone out of the window and if you’re anything like me, the custard creams are back in. “Perhaps next year,” we tell ourselves.

Yet all is not lost!

For everyone who feels a bit of a failure, you are in good company. We all are – if we’re honest.

There’s nothing wrong with working hard and doing well. But we learn much more from the things we fail at, than often the things we succeed at.

So this year, like me, I hope you fail at lots of things – just as I hope and pray you succeed at others.

But more than that, whatever resolutions we make and break: may we learn from that experience.

Resisting temptation – not giving in is hard. Adam and Eve after all knew that problem.

They had everything they could possibly need – but the one thing they couldn’t have became the one thing they wanted.

When they got it, they found out that there were consequences – and soon wished they’d not bothered. There’s a bit of Adam and Eve in all of us.

Yes, it’s quite right that we need to try – and sometimes try harder. But there’s also a process of life in which we discover who we are: and that means discovering we’re not all good at everything.

No one, for example, should ever let me near a DIY project.

What are your strengths and weaknesses is one of those perennial interview questions. At its heart, we’re being asked if we are self-aware: that we know who we are.

This year, that’s no bad question to ask ourselves – to resolve to be who God has made us to be, rather than pretending we’re something we’re not.

Now, where’s the biscuit tin...?