My mom used to tell me, when I was feeling overwhelmed by too many things to do, to just take one thing and start doing it. Once I got going, my motivation kicked in, fear and stress bowed out and I was able to knock my way through my to do list bit by bit. It was the looking at the whole pile of tasks that made me stop in my tracks, thinking it was all too much or wondering how I was going to accomplish everything by the time it needed to be done.
My daughter texted me the other night feeling much the same way about school work. Her list of assignments/papers/tests was looming over her and had frozen her in one spot feeling inadequate for the job. I tried to encourage her to do the same thing – “start with one thing, do one thing at a time and you’ll get through it!”
This morning in my devotional, there was a wonderful illustration of how the fog on the path ahead of us in life is actually one of God’s mercies, enabling us to just focus on the step in front of us, the day we are living in right now. If God were to lift that fog and allow us to see the entire path, with all its twists and turns, mountaintop highs and desperate, painful or lonely lows, we would certainly be overwhelmed and our little feet would probably refuse to move at all. We would stare with open mouths, knotted stomachs and pounding hearts and think “there’s no way I can do all that or get past all of that” or “How in the world will I know what to do or which way to go?”
Accept God’s merciful, loving gift of not having to see all of the future or all the path ahead of you, take his hand (because He’s right beside you) and take one step. Then another, as He leads you. You can live in this day with Him. You can have peace in not having to figure out all of your future at once. God will show you. He will give you all you need to do one thing at a time.
We don’t yet see things clearly. We’re squinting in a fog, peering through a mist. But it won’t be long before the weather clears and the sun shines bright! We’ll see it all then, see it all as clearly as God sees us, knowing him directly just as he knows us!
But for right now, until that completeness, we have three things to do to lead us toward that consummation: Trust steadily in God, hope unswervingly, love extravagantly. – I Corinthians 13:12 The Message
The alarm clock sounds, I drowsily hit the button and sit up in bed. I can almost hear it: the clacking sound of God’s clap board as he gives me a new day. Today He said, “Take 15,330!” Lamentations 3:22-23 tells me, “The faithful love of the L
Has your computer ever crashed? Have you ever had to completely format the hard drive and re-install everything, starting over? I’ve been through this ingratiating process a few times and while it’s aggravating enough to pull some hair and can be a big pain if you lose files or data, it is nice to have a fresh start. When the disk has been completely wiped clean and loaded up anew with the programs it runs so much better and more quickly. There aren’t all those downloaded, uploaded, accumulated files and programs that piled up over the last year or so. All the temp files that were dragging the system down are gone. Any spam or spy ware – gone! It’s clean and zippy – ready to go. You can almost hear your computer sigh a happy “ahhhhh.”
Along the Narrow Path 