I'd rather be outside…
I hate the use of the word hack for everything under the sun, but I’m going to use it here anyway: an afternoon energy hack. I’ve worked this issue over many different ways in my life. For instance, I know enough not to go to a Chinese buffet for lunch on a day when I need to work inside in the afternoon. That is just a recipe for napping on my seat or on my feet. It just does no good. What I eat at lunch makes a big, big difference.
Today I have some thoughts on how to plan your year, but with a little bit of a twist. If you follow my Priority Pastor podcast or my content at all you know I’m fairly big into planning and goal setting and quarterly planning, all that kind of stuff. But one of the most strategic things I do as a part of planning my year is to simply write out a prayer for your year. In this prayer, I write out all the things I’m asking the Lord to do in my life, my family, my ministry, in the high level areas that I concern myself with.
This can be done in the new year, at your birthday or in the middle of the year if you have not done it yet, so really whenever you plan your year. I typically do this near the beginning of the new year, and then tweak it a little bit and make sure it kind of covers everything I want it to cover. Then for the first few weeks of the new year, I will review it and pray it over and then I’ll forget about it. I have this actually in a file I do every year called seeking and then the year number. So this year it’s Seeking 2023, and it’s basically seeking God.
Today I want to share with you a teaching I did for 12Church ministry on the whole issue of pain while we’re engaged in ministry. How do we continue in ministry when we’re experiencing pain? How do we carry on in ministry when surrounded and immersed in pain, especially working with people in pain? How do we do that?
Here are some thoughts: Can we engage on mission with Jesus when we’re in deep pain?
For a few days last week my phone was driving me crazy. It would be good most of the day and then every evening it froze up on me. I could reboot it and it would work for a couple minutes, then it would freeze. I couldn’t figure out what was going on and it was driving me bonkers.
Finally, I did what you’re really supposed to do and I started playing with apps and looking at which apps were on, trying to turn some on and some off. At one point I got a notification from the nightlight app that it was having an issue. That was the clue because it was the blue light filter that I had set to come on at nine o’clock in the evening, and I realized that’s when my phone was seizing up.
I made two decisions this morning right at the start of my day that are going to save me four hours a week, as a conservative average, for the rest of the year. To me that’s just amazing. When I figured out what those two decisions were going to do in my life, the decisions actually became a little bit easier.
Now, the first decision I made was about the YouTube video I’ve been producing once a week for our 12Church. It’s a foundational bit of teaching and leadership level stuff, which I think are important. We’ve got some good and very important videos out there talking about discipleship versus disciple making, and some of those basic disciple making principles. It takes me about about four hours a week to do that.