“My To-Do Lists and God’s Priorities”
Sometimes, I confuse my to-do list with what should be my priorities.
Take this morning, for example. My affirmation to my sponsor (as well as to myself and God) was as follows:
“Today, by God’s grace, I will spread mulch, do some (hopefully) creative writing, and work at Bob Evans. I will do these things because they are fun to do, because they need doing, because they may benefit other people, and because they will glorify God when they are done in the right way with the right attitude.” (Down to Earth Believer, affirmation sent to 12-step sponsor.”)
But then, I turned to a daily retreat sponsored by the Jesuits and Loyola Press, and read the following reflections on 1 Corinthians 13:13, which says “So faith, hope, love remain, these three; but the greatest of these is love.”
“This scripture passage offers us a chance to reflect on our priorities. It tells us that, at the end of the day, it won’t be the school we graduated from, our annual income, or our zip code that matters. Rather, we will be judged by our fidelity to God, our hope in Christ and the power of his Resurrection, and the love that we show ourselves and our neighbor. It’s as simple as that.” (Excerpt from the “3-Minute Retreat” for today, April 27, 2017, http://www.loyolapress.com/retreats/love-lasts-forever-start-retreat.)
This invited me to do a little probing of my to-do list. Here is the question: Do my priorities match up with and reflect God’s priorities for all believers? In other words, am I going to choose to spread mulch in a loving, hopeful, faith-filled way?
This is one of those questions that I can’t always answer, and don’t want to answer. I don’t always like other people’s answers to my questions. I often flat-out detest my own answers.
My answer will not come in the form of this post. It will not come primarily in terms of my feelings or thoughts. My answer will come as I put each shovelful of mulch in the wheel barrow and spread it around our flower beds.
Ultimately, only God can decide how lovingly, how hopefully, how faithfully I mulched the flower beds. But I can at least live with the question.
Postscript: I wrote this blog yesterday, so that I could post it early this morning. I got the mulching pretty well done. I’m going to the chiropractor this morning.
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