This week I've been utterly overwhelmed with all of the different roles I am playing this semester. I have my role as a student, as an RA, as an employee (in two separate positions), as prospective law student, as a friend, as a daughter, as a sister, as a girlfriend, and as a human being just trying to stay healthy. To top it off, I discovered a crack in my windshield this morning that probably will need to be fixed before driving home for Spring Break at the end of this week. I was gifted an awesome planner for Christmas that I've been using to schedule myself and prioritize projects. At the beginning of the week I sat down to try and organize myself in this planner, scheduling out my days half hour by half hour, and I discovered that 24 hours in a day just simply is not enough.
I'm sure that most people can relate to the chaos of trying to fill more roles in life than you can count, regardless of your stage of life. When something needs to go, though, what is the first thing? I'll tell you that this week, for me, it was spending time with God. Thank goodness that He's shouting loud enough for me to pause and pay attention to Him today, only halfway through the week, before my head explodes.
As I sit in our local coffee shop I am reminded that of all my roles only one really matters: my role as a follower of Christ. If I'm seeking Him, everything else will work out. I took a moment this morning to pause and listen to Him, looking through the red text in the New Testament, and was drawn to a fairly popular passage in Mark. Jesus has just been asked which of the commandments is the most important and this is His answer: "Love the lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength. The second is this: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' There is no commandment greater than these" (Mark 12:30-31).
This reminds me that nothing is as important as loving God and loving His people. I shouldn't be fulfilling these roles that I am overwhelmed by this week simply because they're items on my to-do list, but because God has called me to each of them in this moment of life. Every item that I check off should be to God's glory, even the most tedious task stops feeling stressful when its done to fulfill God's command to love Him and His people. The papers I write this week are for God's glory so that I can learn about this world that He's created, the copy and paste data entry that I do this week is for God's glory so that I can share the load with coworkers and earn money to use to further His kingdom. The conversations I have are to connect and love the people God has guided me to know.
Today Christ re-centered me on Him, and I challenge you to let Him do the same for you. I guarantee that even the longest of to-do lists will seem less stressful when you are reminded of your call to life. Your purpose here is to love God and love His people - do everything with that in your heart, and trust that God will help you find the time to do what needs to be done.
Showing posts with label priorities. Show all posts
Showing posts with label priorities. Show all posts
Wednesday, February 21, 2018
Wednesday, November 16, 2016
Put it in its Place
This semester I have had a constant whisper from that still small voice: "Put it in its place."
Worrying about school? About work? About money? About illness? About politics? About time?
Put it in its place.
God did not create us to live anxious, worry filled lives. He created us to live lives full in Him. God didn't declare "You shall have no other gods before me" (Exodus 20:3) for His benefit, but for our benefit.
When you worry, are you elevating the subject of your anxiety to a place that it doesn't deserve to hold? There is a place in our lives for worry, for work, for studying, for money, for political analysis. There is a place for most of what we fill our lives with, but where it becomes harmful is when we make it more important than it is. Put it in its place.
For me, this semester, it's one of my classes. It's a business simulation that runs on a weekly schedule, where competition results come out on Sunday night at 9PM and then we spend the rest of the week analyzing what happened in the simulation and making decisions for the next week. It is one of those things that could truly never be done. No matter how much time I put in from week to week, there is always more analysis that I could be doing, more calculations that I could make. When I get caught up in the simulation I can easily spend several hours doing nothing but staring at the computer screen and moving numbers around. Do I get any fulfillment from this? No. Does it make me a better person? No. Does extensive analysis help me to learn the class objectives better? No. Could my team do better if I were to do nothing but look at these simulation results? Maybe.
It's in these times when I am so caught up in this simulation or other classwork that God tells me to step back and put this class in its place. I wasn't created for this class. This class does have a purpose, but elevating it to a level outside of its rightful place in my life does nothing beneficial to my learning or to my character development.
For the first eight weeks of this class my team consistently was not seeing results that matched up with the amount of time and effort we were putting into the simulation. I felt beaten down and exhausted by this class, and by the time week eight rolled around I was ready to quit, feeling pretty bad about myself and my abilities. Together with my team and professor I put a final push into week eight, exerting more time and energy on this simulation than any week before, vowing that I would do nothing but the bare minimum from there on out if the week eight results weren't better.
Week Eight was a roaring success. The results came out Sunday at 9PM, as per usual, and I was overjoyed. A funny thing happened as the week went on, though. After the initial excitement, this success didn't fulfill me, and much like our prior failures didn't define me, this success didn't either. I laughed at God when I realized that even though I had been trying to listen to Him all semester and put this class in its place, I really had believed that everything in my life would align and go well once this class went well. But that wasn't true, and even with this personal "win" I still had to put the class in its place.
The only thing that defines us is Christ's love for us, not anything that we can do or say in this life. When facets of life begin to take over, don't let them. Keep them where they belong, and keep your eye on the prize (or, rather, gift): eternal life with our Savior. Worry as necessary, work as necessary, study as necessary, but don't let any of those things take over. Put it in its place.
Worrying about school? About work? About money? About illness? About politics? About time?
Put it in its place.
God did not create us to live anxious, worry filled lives. He created us to live lives full in Him. God didn't declare "You shall have no other gods before me" (Exodus 20:3) for His benefit, but for our benefit.
When you worry, are you elevating the subject of your anxiety to a place that it doesn't deserve to hold? There is a place in our lives for worry, for work, for studying, for money, for political analysis. There is a place for most of what we fill our lives with, but where it becomes harmful is when we make it more important than it is. Put it in its place.
For me, this semester, it's one of my classes. It's a business simulation that runs on a weekly schedule, where competition results come out on Sunday night at 9PM and then we spend the rest of the week analyzing what happened in the simulation and making decisions for the next week. It is one of those things that could truly never be done. No matter how much time I put in from week to week, there is always more analysis that I could be doing, more calculations that I could make. When I get caught up in the simulation I can easily spend several hours doing nothing but staring at the computer screen and moving numbers around. Do I get any fulfillment from this? No. Does it make me a better person? No. Does extensive analysis help me to learn the class objectives better? No. Could my team do better if I were to do nothing but look at these simulation results? Maybe.
It's in these times when I am so caught up in this simulation or other classwork that God tells me to step back and put this class in its place. I wasn't created for this class. This class does have a purpose, but elevating it to a level outside of its rightful place in my life does nothing beneficial to my learning or to my character development.
For the first eight weeks of this class my team consistently was not seeing results that matched up with the amount of time and effort we were putting into the simulation. I felt beaten down and exhausted by this class, and by the time week eight rolled around I was ready to quit, feeling pretty bad about myself and my abilities. Together with my team and professor I put a final push into week eight, exerting more time and energy on this simulation than any week before, vowing that I would do nothing but the bare minimum from there on out if the week eight results weren't better.
Week Eight was a roaring success. The results came out Sunday at 9PM, as per usual, and I was overjoyed. A funny thing happened as the week went on, though. After the initial excitement, this success didn't fulfill me, and much like our prior failures didn't define me, this success didn't either. I laughed at God when I realized that even though I had been trying to listen to Him all semester and put this class in its place, I really had believed that everything in my life would align and go well once this class went well. But that wasn't true, and even with this personal "win" I still had to put the class in its place.
The only thing that defines us is Christ's love for us, not anything that we can do or say in this life. When facets of life begin to take over, don't let them. Keep them where they belong, and keep your eye on the prize (or, rather, gift): eternal life with our Savior. Worry as necessary, work as necessary, study as necessary, but don't let any of those things take over. Put it in its place.
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