READ: ISAIAH 26: 1-5, 12
Lord, you will grant us peace, for all we have accomplished is really from you. (V. 12)
Throughout my life I have been a planner and organizer working from lists of things to do to meet my goals at home and work. The larger life impacting goals I was able to track in my mind and mentally check off the steps toward their achievement without writing them down. The more mundane tasks related to my daily schedule I committed to writing to keep things straight. Now that my hair is grey my mind has lost a little of its former razor-sharp edge. Now it is absolutely necessary for me to prepare notes of what needs to get done to get through the day, month or year. To be sure I need lists to help keep my daily life on track, but I need to constantly guard against them directing my reason for living.
Scrutinizing our lists for a successful day, project or lifetime is not something that takes place very often. Once we lock into what we feel needs to be done to bring satisfaction, stability, fulfillment, and peace to our personal existence, we tend to plough straight ahead and try not to get side-tracked. Our minds and actions become fixated on our “to do” lists causing us to become inflexible slaves to our pre-determined plans of action. Dedication to successful task completion requires us to narrowly focus our limited time and energy to get the item off our list so we can proceed to the next task or even the next list. But far too often, in this personally directed plan of action for successful living, we neglect to align our goals with God’s Will for our lives. Failing to do this renders any goal or task setting ineffective and peace of mind fleeting at best.
Without centralizing our focus on the living presence of God within each of us, the Holy Spirit, we tend to let our never-ending lists of life be guided by the secular demands and influences of this world. True, when we cross an item off our list it brings us a form of partial peace, but frequently for only a short period of time. For example, you save and buy the house of your dreams and celebrate but then your list begins to grow as you add maintenance, insurance, and taxes to your list. To avoid being continually on the treadmill of life with peace always just barely out of reach, we need to center on the presence of God allowing him to help us sort out our priorities and fashion our lists.
PAUSE FOR REFLECTION AND PRAYER
Submit all the to do lists of your current life to the Lord for critical examination /prioritization and know His peace.
Dear Lord God, help me realize without you, my to-do list of life is incomplete and meaningless.