May 7, 2023
What is important to you? Do you know? Do you live your life with a purpose in mind, or do you just rush from moment to moment, appointment to appointment, with no real destination in sight? Despite many technological advances, our society today seems to be headed nowhere…at breakneck speed! How do we reverse this trend? We can start by looking carefully “where we walk”. Instead of flitting about place to place, walk carefully. Let me illustrate. I used to have a neighbor who owned some geese. I need to rephrase that; my neighbor had a bunch of geese. We had no fence between our yards, so the geese were actually neighborhood geese. As a matter of fact, Dave's geese loved our yard. By the way, when geese invite themselves over into a person's yard, they do so for one, make that two, purposes. The first is to eat. I suppose they eat ticks and bugs off the grass which is a good thing. However, eating bugs leads to the second purpose of yard invading…pooping. Geese are not particular where they poop. They will just let 'er fly. The evidence of this unconcern for pooping protocol could be seen in the fact that most generally, we had goose poop all over our driveway and all over our yard. We had to LOOK CAREFULLY where we walked to avoid stepping in goose leftovers. In each of our lives, there is a bunch of “mess” in our path that we need to avoid. Negativity, hatred, impatience, and selfishness surround all of us. Be vigilant to avoid stepping neck deep into it. Next, we need to learn to make wise use of our time. Have you ever noticed that some people get a lot accomplished during their day while others accomplish very little? The difference is time management. We need to be focusing on the important and critical tasks rather than the unimportant and trivial. Many people let their day come to them rather than taking control of their day. Those that let their day just happen will find "trouble" lurking everywhere. We must learn to manage our time and plan our day. Finally, we need to learn to walk through our day with focus. We must learn to begin our day with the end in mind (Just in case you thought I had suddenly come up with some clever prose, I borrowed that last phrase from the late Steven Covey...the bit about the goose poop is original however). We must begin our day with the end in mind. What does that mean? It means knowing where you need to go and knowing how to get there. It means doing the things that will get you where you want to go and not allowing yourself to be detoured down blind alleys while stepping in goose poop. When we lay our heads on our pillows tonight, may we all have the peaceful rest that comes with knowing that for today at least, we walked in God's way, fulfilling His purpose for our lives, while making a difference in the lives of others. Then, if God blesses us with another day, let's do the same thing tomorrow.
Be blessed and be a blessing . . . Bro. Andy
