In Luke 14:28-30 Jesus says “Suppose one of you wants to build a tower. Will he not first sit down and estimate the cost to see if he has enough money to complete it? For if he lays the foundation and is not able to finish it, everyone who sees it will ridicule him, saying, ‘This fellow began to build and was not able to finish.’”
One of the greatest difficulties in life is setting priorities and making a plan according to those priorities. Personally, I can manage priorities for only about a week at a time. Each week I know that there are certain things that need to be done and other things that I want to get done. It’s a good week if I accomplish all of those things. But to apply that same principle to a month or an entire year? For me at least, it seems impossible to know how to pace myself.
There are some things in life that are relatively easy to plan for. If your priority is to go to college, you know that you need to work in high school to have grades that are good enough to get into college. If you want to go on vacation, you need to save for that vacation (or suffer the credit card debt after the fact.)
On the other hand, there are a lot of curveballs that life throws at us. A friend of mine went to college to be an elementary school teacher, only to reach the end of the curriculum and have to do student teaching. There she discovered that she didn’t enjoy the kids as much as she had anticipated. Likewise, you may make a major purchase only to unexpectedly lose your job six months later. Or have your house damaged in a storm. Or deal with a serious illness.
The point is that there are some things that we can plan for and others that we can’t. There are times that we encounter speed-bumps in life and we need to maintain the course and keep our priorities and goals ahead of us. Other times we need to recognize when our goal is not reachable or at least currently detoured.
I’ve recently read some of my previous posts regarding goals for Spreading Light Ministries. I’m quite proud of the things that I’ve accomplished with the site but there are times that my goals have been laughable. I’ve made reference to pages and sites that I hoped to launch in a month and they haven’t been launched four years later. There are a multitude of reasons why and ultimately they’re not that important.
In the past month I have completely re-evaluated my online ministry. There are times when I got away from my priorities. Other times I had a new priority only to discover that it wasn’t as important or as successful as I had hoped. In the last month or so I have shut down six websites with plans to close another two. For the most part I’m not doing away with the content of the sites, just rearranging things in a more logical order under and a smaller footprint. It does little good to have a dozen sites with fifteen pages each if I can logically reduce them into three sites with sixty pages each.
In church and in our personal lives, we should periodically evaluate our priorities. We often do this when things are going well but it’s just as important when things are going well. What worked for us in the past may not be serving us well now. And even more importantly, it may not serve us well in the future.
This week I got to spend time with my mentor. He was saying how much he uses Powerpoint in his sermons and presentations and ten years ago he never would have thought about it. This isn’t someone who is afraid of technology either. This is someone who had a job offer from IBM in the early 1960’s but ended up being drafted instead. The point is that times change and we must be willing to adapt with it.
We need to remember that as Christians and a part of the church our main priority never changes. Jesus Christ is always the main priority. The difference is how we pursue Him. Water hasn’t changed since creation but we certainly don’t get it the same way that someone did even 150 years. We need to constantly be asking ourselves if our priorities are still in line with the direction God wants us headed in.