Category: God

Balance: The Key to Life?

man-looking-at-mountainBalance. It’s the one thing in life that we all seem to struggle to maintain. Being able to work and advance our careers without having to sacrifice our families. Or it can be the opposite where we want to build relationships with our family and friends that our boss thinks that we are a flake at work. Add in our spiritual walk and it can be even harder to find balance.

I know this by personal experience. There can be times where I know I’m out of balance but I want to get this project done for work, or I need to finish something for the ministry. On top of that I want to be a good husband and father. Finding balance is one thing, but maintaining it is something completely different.

What would it look like to have perfect balance in all areas of your life? It probably would look like the perfect life. One where we have the awesome job that is fulfilling, a great family life, and friends that build us up. There are so many possibilities for each of us in life. With that comes a lot of areas and possibilities that we can be out of balance.

Many successful, really successful people, got to the “top of the mountain” and did so at the sacrifice of their families. How do we fight this imbalance? How do we make sure that there isn’t a trail of broken relationships behind us as we try to strive for greatness? This begs the question on whether or not we really can have it all.

Yes, I truly believe that we can have it all. There are some things that we have to do in order to make sure that we can be successful in all areas of our lives.

1. Self Assessments – We have to be able to look at ourselves and see all our greatness and all our faults. Sometimes we can let our pride cloud how we see ourselves.

2. Accountability – We need to have someone in our life that we listen to even when we are emotional, or struggling to make a decision. My wife is this person for me. She can tell me when that I’m being unreasonable, or that I’m letting something bother me when it shouldn’t. I listen to her, even when I may not want to.

What are you doing to get or maintain balance in your life?

Why Fast?

cup-of-almondsToday, I wanted to give an update on my fasting. This month in my local church we’re doing something called OctoberFast. We we as a congregation are fasting every Friday this month. We are also having a time of prayer Friday nights. My personal decision has been to fast everyday until 12pm.

Continue reading “Why Fast?”

Comfort is not Your Friend

In front of lake

Why You need to be Uncomfortable

Today is one of those days. I’m not feeling particularly motivated and I wasn’t really sure about what to write for today’s 500 word challenge. I believe that we all have days like this. Where we would like to coast through the day and go back to bed. Somehow we have the fondest memories of what it’s like to be in bed, not realizing that it’s that same bed that is keeping us from achieving our dreams.

If you ask most people what it is that they love about their bed; they would say something about the comfortability of it. While that may be needed in a mattress and blankets, it is not needed in other areas of our lives. Too much comfort will cause us to stay in same place in our lives. We will not grow as a person. We lose interest in the world around us and then drift through life in our comfortability.

This is why we see older couples get divorced. The kids have all grown up and out of the house. The parents realize that they have spent the last 20 or more years in comfort. It was comfortable to make everything about the kids. They can look at each other and think that they don’t know their spouse anymore. What really happened is that they became comfortable in the routines that they had. They did not continue to develop themselves first and then their relationship with each other second. Everything it takes to raise children became the top priorities in life.

Comfortability also effects us spiritually. We like to have our church services for an hour or so, we like for our pastor to teach about the good things in the Bible, and we want there to be a great children’s ministry. We get upset if they don’t sing the songs we like, or if we need to help out when we weren’t on the schedule for that day.

The problem with comfortability is that it puts the focus on ourselves. We look at everything through the lens of what is best for us. We can forget the main reason of why. In the previous two examples we can forget why we fell in love with our spouse, why we got married, why we go to church, or why we volunteer and help our church.

We can never forget our why. This should be what drives us to be the best version of ourself. It’s what gets us up in the morning after the previous day was long. There is a great video by this comedian, Michael Jr., where he explains knowing our why. Here’s the link and let me know what you guys think.

The fight we fight on a daily basis to get a place where there is balance. We want to have stability in different areas of our lives, but so much comfortability that we coast through the rest of our lives. There is so much for us each to do, so many opportunities to be a blessing to people around us that we can miss it all, we can miss life if we’re not looking.