Keeping Priorities Straight When Life's Little Disasters Strike

Last Thursday morning I was in the kitchen—the start of a normal day I thought—when I heard an ominous sound. It sounded like water dripping in the family room. Sure enough, water was dripping fast through the first floor family room ceiling from a shower on the floor above.

And so began a home repair odyssey that has not yet ended. I rushed upstairs only to discover that when the previous homeowners had installed shelving in the linen closet they had screwed it into the access panel to the shower. The entire shelving system had to come out of the closet—and ultimately a hole larger than the access panel had to be cut into the closet wall in order to get to the problem. That meant a lot of Thursday was chewed up getting ready for the plumber and triaging to save the family room ceiling. Then I spent five hours on Friday dealing with the plumber. Saturday and Sunday the wall had to be repaired and spackled. While we were at it, we figured we might as well spackle numerous holes in the closet apparently left by homeowners past. Monday I repainted the closet. Now some sort of shelving needs to be reinstalled and the linen closet contents, strewn about the spare bedroom, put away. Basically a week of disruption and unexpected chores, one thing leading to another as always seems to happen.

And the scary part is, this is just one example of how time dissolves. My life is filled with similar examples. A couple months ago the IRS told us we owed them more taxes. We spent two full days unearthing three-year-old papers to explain why we did not. When the IRS later wrote us a sunny letter telling us that, oh yes, we were right after all, I felt like asking for a refund of my two days.

I know your life is the same as mine. We all deal with these unexpected, time sucking problems and, if we are not careful, we move from crisis to crisis until we wake up one day and realize weeks and months have gone by and we haven’t done anything we really wanted or set out to do. It’s a sobering thought--especially today, November 1, when we realize the year is fast waning and the next two months will be especially busy with holiday preparations and celebrations.

Keeping our spiritual lives as a priority amidst busy days is not some new problem. The book of Haggai tells us God's people got side-tracked for 14 years by home improvement projects. God told them to carefully consider the way they were spending their days and get their priorities back in line. Hebrews tells us to deal with this problem aggressively by "throwing off" everything that hinders us and running the spiritual race with perseverance lest we kind of just drift off course.

Take some time today to think about how you can keep God at the top of your to-do list when life’s tiny crises hit and the busy-ness of the holidays begins. Personally, I’ve discovered that rock solid habits are the only way I can do it. I actually write a list every single day: “Read Bible. Pray. Exercise. Shower.” Then I add other things to the list like “repaint linen closet” or “look for tax papers.” And I do the reading and praying first so that, hopefully, it will already be done when the family room ceiling caves in. This, plus weaving little layers of God time in throughout the day (like listening to a sermon on tape while I repair the closet!) helps keep my priorities focused and, as the author of Hebrews would say, my eyes fixed on Jesus.

...Let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles, and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us. Let us fix our eyes on Jesus.... Hebrews 12:1-2