What’s important to you? If you take a step back and look at your life, what are the things that add the most value? What would you miss the most if it wasn’t there? What are you giving the most time and attention to?
Where does the time go?
In her book The Top 5 Regrets of the Dying, palliative nurse Bronnie Ware wrote about her experiences caring for people who were close to death and recorded the things they wished they had done differently in their lives. Here are the five most common regrets as listed in the book:
- Not having the courage to be true to themselves and instead lived for others
- Working too hard
- Not expressing their feelings
- Not staying in touch with friends
- Not letting themselves be happier
So much to do, so little time
It’s surprising how quickly our lives can become full. There are many things that vie for out time and attention and can take our focus off what is truly important. Author Stephen Covey wrote about how life can become full of urgent, but not necessarily important things in his book First Things First. He used an illustration of a man with a glass jar and filled with large rock and small pebbles. If the man filled his glass jar with small pebbles first, he’d never be able to fit the large rocks into the jar as well. If he put his large rocks in first and then the smaller pebbles, the man would find that he was able to fit in not only the larger pieces but the small ones as well.
The point of the story is that the large rocks represent the important things in our lives and the smaller stones are those things that, while they may matter, are lower down on the scale. If you don’t make space for the main priorities first, other things will clutter your life and take up time and energy that you should be spending on those things that matter most to you.
Making the main thing the main thing
Many people believe that there will be time for God when they’re older. They want to live their lives free from constraint and “religion,” living as they choose and add God in when they get the time. Unfortunately, life has a tendency to move faster than we realise and unless you prioritise giving God place in your daily existence you will probably find your never get around it. The Bible tells us that we should put God first. Make him our number one priority and that everything else – our physical, emotional, and financial needs – will be met because we chose to make a relationship with God our main goal.
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