Tonight was the ninth meeting of the current session of Dad’s Teach the Bible. This is the session where as many of my kids that are available come and those in the workshop interview them. It is typically one of the highlights of the 10 weeks.
The key guy, the guy who instigated our doing this workshop at this church, came about thirty minutes early. He and I talked about a lot of things. During the course of the conversation he made a couple of side comments that floored my minds accelerator. I am still processing this so I may not share it well, but here goes…
At the beginning of each workshop, session 1, I warn the men that the enemy will do everything he can to keep them from coming and finishing. It took me years to see the pattern. Their business will take off, or go down. Their family will have challenges, or begin to take more time. It happens every time. Men get sidelined.
What my friend said that overspun my flywheel, was that in business we can only do what we can do and we have to trust God to make it work out. That is not how I operated, and I do not know many who do. If we are engaged in business we tend to bury ourselves in the presenting problems. We work hard to come up with plans and strategies to get them done, on time, on budget, etc. It can consume most of the 168 hours a week that we all have, and quickly.
Bottom line we trust ourselves to figure out the problem.
The reality is, we cannot anticipate everything that can go wrong or right. What we should do is approach our work with excellence, yes. But we schedule time that is vitally important to our walk with God and the development of our family first, and we hold to that schedule.
That requires us to trust God with the time that we devote to our work, Colossians 3:17, 23. However, applying those verses is not license to become a workaholic, which, at some level is what I did. Rather, it is to trust God that the time we invest in the work is adequate and that He will honor that time and we will trust Him with the outcome.
That is really easy to write. Not so easy to live. But if we ever aspire to any modicum of balance in our lives, we have to learn to trust God with what we are able to do not what we want to do.
At the beginning of each workshop, session 1, I warn the men that the enemy will do everything he can to keep them from coming and finishing. It took me years to see the pattern. Their business will take off, or go down. Their family will have challenges, or begin to take more time. It happens every time. Men get sidelined.
What my friend said that overspun my flywheel, was that in business we can only do what we can do and we have to trust God to make it work out. That is not how I operated, and I do not know many who do. If we are engaged in business we tend to bury ourselves in the presenting problems. We work hard to come up with plans and strategies to get them done, on time, on budget, etc. It can consume most of the 168 hours a week that we all have, and quickly.
Bottom line we trust ourselves to figure out the problem.
The reality is, we cannot anticipate everything that can go wrong or right. What we should do is approach our work with excellence, yes. But we schedule time that is vitally important to our walk with God and the development of our family first, and we hold to that schedule.
That requires us to trust God with the time that we devote to our work, Colossians 3:17, 23. However, applying those verses is not license to become a workaholic, which, at some level is what I did. Rather, it is to trust God that the time we invest in the work is adequate and that He will honor that time and we will trust Him with the outcome.
That is really easy to write. Not so easy to live. But if we ever aspire to any modicum of balance in our lives, we have to learn to trust God with what we are able to do not what we want to do.
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