What has to be missing from our lives to create issues for us? What, if taken without notice, might even create crisis? If you take away my blood pressure medicine (my issues are mild and age related), then after a couple of days I start to feel the effects. If you take away my Diet Dr. Pepper, well, “Houston, we have a problem.” What, if it were missing from your life, would create issues for you? What, if it were to stop, would create problems for your children or your family?
In the staff meeting yesterday, I asked the team if anything in particular was missing. After a moment, one person piped up and observed that the daily devotionals had been missing for a couple of days. That was the answer for which I was looking. I might add that this particular absence was deliberate on my part. I know what I feel the importance of these devotionals to be, but I needed to see what the importance of these devotionals might be to those who receive them. I also was seeking to see how, as a team, we might handle issues of accountability; but that is a spiritual issue that we’ll discuss another day.
The question that I asked the team members present for the meeting (a lot of us are traveling now) was: “What ministry are you performing right now that would be missed if it were to stop?” It’s a thought-provoking and spiritual question, isn’t it? The gifts of our time, our skill, our education, our experience, and our energy have limits, after all, because of our humanity. We only have so much of any of those things. So we are forced by the inexorable ticking of the clock to make decisions, to prioritize.
Basing his work on biblical thought, Stephen Covey has proposed that we prioritize our time by the urgent/not urgent and important/not important categories.
Quadrant I - urgent and important
Quadrant II - not urgent, but important
Quadrant III - urgent, but not important
Quadrant IV - not urgent or important
Obviously, this is important for our lives. How we use time is a fundamentally spiritual issue. We decide which ministries (if we’re Christians, then what do we do that is not ministry?) are urgent or important, and put other work in other categories. This brings up a lot of questions:
How would God have us use the day that he has given us?
What ministries that we perform would those around us miss most quickly?
Where does our prayer life fit in the midst of this?
How much is prayer bound by time?
What work that we do is of the highest importance, whether or not anyone else thinks it is urgent or not?
For me, one of my answers to this last question has been this series of daily devotional messages. It is not that what I personally have to say is that important; I have shared this space with other voices that are equally valued and important. Even when I have spoken, I have often quoted scripture or the words of spiritual sages who have gone on before. The importance for me is that we spend spiritual time in quadrant II (Important, not urgent). As a consequence, in the course of our day we can use our properly spiritual focus to help us spend more time in quadrant II instead of quadrant III (urgent, but not important) . If our focus is off too much, then even little things can slip into quadrant I (urgent and important).
Jesus resisted quadrant III and IV (not urgent and not important). He spent time in ways that others did not always understand; for example, his withdrawing by himself to pray, even at times when other people had other things they wanted from him. We need to do this, too. The habits that Jesus modeled, we need to emulate. This is because younger or smaller eyes are watching us and deciding whether to mimic us, or to critique us with the particularly prophetic voice of a child. Please spend some of your God-given time today thinking about how you handle your time; it’s not merely a logistical issue – it’s a spiritual issue.
Blessings,
Ron
