You know what’s fun? Living for the things you actually care about! It may sound obvious, but I lived for a long time with my jar filled with sand, trying to squeeze in the things I claimed to be priorities, until I put the brakes on life and stopped the insanity.
About six years ago, my husband asked me to say no to everything for a year. It was a year of detox for our calendar. “No” to everything reset our pace…and when the year was up, there was room for the big rocks.
It’s easy to fill life up with busy and if we aren’t careful there isn’t room for the things we value the most. We can’t live smashing the big rocks into a sand-filled jar. The year of no drained the sand and there were fewer things fighting for my attention. I had the freedom to choose and the space to define what was important.
If you are new to the “asking God” thing…maybe this is a place you start. Say no until you feel like God says, “Yes.” Even after that year, as I started adding in some big rocks, I didn’t feel like I had permission from God to look too far ahead. I had some brokenness in my patterns that I needed to yield to Him, and a few years later I felt like He gave me the “yes” to start dreaming again…but if I had pushed there, I might have placed dreams in the jar thinking they were big rocks that weren’t actually for me.
So what are my big rocks?
- Make choices with eternity in mind, because life is short and eternity is long
- Be the wind in our team’s sails
- Live strategically
- Stay mentally healthy
- Yield to and reflect God’s glory
Create the space to identify your big rocks. It will allow you to be choosey with what you do and don’t do. Just because something is a good thing or even good for someone else…doesn’t mean it’s good for you. Fight for the big rocks…it’s where freedom begins.
