The One Big Idea...

A group of six of us just got back this afternoon from LA (that's Los Angeles, not Lower Arkansas) after attending a three-day Celebrate Recovery Summit. It was INCREDIBLE. The worship, the speakers, the testimonies, the encouragement...all of it was fantastic. Oh, and did I mention it was in Southern California? One of my favorite places on the globe...

My rule for any of these conferences I attend is that I must get one grand idea, and it is all worth it. If I spend $1000 on travel, hotel, meals, and get one $1000 idea out of it, I'm well ahead. Well, I'm going to give you my one grand idea...for free! It came on Thursday afternoon, from Dr. Henry Cloud, psychologist and author (and a pretty darn good speaker too). It had to do with the difference between the URGENT and the VITAL. To sum it up, VITAL things are those decisions/actions that are not immediately gratifying or frutiful, but produce LIFE-SUSTAINING results. URGENT things are those that may produce short-term satisfaction or results, but end up robbing you of LIFE. For example: you choose to work late again because your boss has asked you to; as a result, you miss your son's baseball game. The immediate payoff is that your boss is happy and you earn some overtime; the long-term payoff is that your son does not trust or expect anything from you, even in times when he may need his father the most.
Why is this a grand idea? I was very convicted in that, while I would love to spend all of my time on the vital things, oftentimes I spend a majority of my days doing the urgent things, and especially doing the urgent things that either a) other people have deemed urgent for me, or b)others have left undone. And, when it does come time to do the VITAL, I find that I am doing them just to check off of my list, therefore relegating them to the urgent. "There is a way that seems right to man, but it ends in death..."

there's more to this concept, but if you want to read more about it, I guess you'll just have to get Dr. Cloud's book, The One-Life Solution, and read along with me.

The storm before the...

It rained yesterday. Big, buckets of rain. Lightning (at least we think it was lightning) struck a tree next to our driveway, and felled a huge branch that landed right between our van and our car (thank you Jesus!). The church's fellowship hall flooded (again), but on a bright note, the one place where we've had perennial leaks (around the vent hood) was dry, after many months of non-dry days. Back at home, our above-ground (with the little inflatable ring top) reached critical mass, and started to overflow (before I caught it; still a mess). And then, to top it off, we think a skunk somehow got either under our house, or sprayed into one of the crawlspace vents, or something, because our whole house smelled like skunk when I came home for lunch yesterday. And to top it all off, Brett Favre got traded to the Jets. ENOUGH ALREADY!

As is usual, if there was a calm before this storm, I missed it. But sometimes, when I feel like I'm just moving from storm to storm with little or no calm in between, I have a moment of clarity, reminding me that I am POWERLESS over these things, and can only be responsible for how I respond to these things. I can respond with frustration and anger, or disappointment and sadness, or any combination, OR...I can acknowledge that I am NOT in control, and confess my faults for ever thinking I was. I really think that God sees us juggling, and just keeps chucking balls into the fray as if to say, "you think you're tougher than me, eh?" until we can't keep it all in the air any more, and we HAVE to drop everything and look to Him. And it's these moments that I am reminded once again that I am a passenger on this journey, and am working still on the grateful part...