A Time for Change
As I write this morning, I have just awakened from the one night per year with a built-in extra hour of sleep. Yes, thanks to that quirky calendar trick, Daylight Saving Time ended at 2:00 a.m. this morning, so we set our clocks (at least the important ones) back an hour before retiring last night.
This should serve as a trigger for us to do a few things as we close out the calendar year over the next 55 days:
- It is highly recom mended that when we change our clocks we should alsochange the batteries in our smoke detectors. This is likely a good practice and an extremely cheap form of insurance for our family’s safety. I must confess I have not always done well with this one.
- With the holidays fast approaching you must plan accordingly making sure that your gifting expectations match up with your budgetary capabilities. Just because you believe that Grandma needs __________________________ (fill in the blank), doesn’t mean she actually needs or expects it from you. It also doesn’t mean that it is prudent for you to provide that along with a gift for every person who is a twig on your family tree.
- Also with the holidays and the winter season coming on it is a great idea to take a physical inventory of your health and make some decisions to give yourself a gift that keeps on giving, Better Health. My recommendation is at a minimum take a measure of your weight today and set a goal to make it through the greatest eating season of the year with no weight gain come January 1 of 2017. It would also be a good idea to set up a visit with your primary care physician if you have not had a checkup recently, to make sure all systems are on go.
- Make sleep a priority. I am not going to tell you that every one of us needs to get to bed and get in a full 8 hours every night. In an ideal world that would be great, however we live in a fallen world where things move at a blistering pace. My suggestion is to begin with setting some bounds of consistency. Try going to sleep within a 30 minute window each night and getting up in a similar 30 minute window in the morning. I would also recommend with this to not drop below 6 hours per night of sleep.
- Spend some time planning the coming year. This may be setting a spiritual goal, vacation goal, financial goal, health goal . . . As you make these plans I would also suggest setting in place some systems within your life to flow toward these goals. These final weeks can be a good trial run for modifying your day to day activities.
- Finally, enjoy the time you spend with your family and friends. Look back over the course of the past year, think about how many people in your sphere of family, friends, and church group have passed from this life since this time last year. Many of those families can likely look back with regret, thinking they should have or could have done something more with this loved one. As the band Climax sang back in 1972, “precious and few are the moments we too can
share. . . “
No matter how you choose to address these ideas the one thing that will assure that you Do Well is to take care of your spiritual relationship with God. He desires a relationship with you and has sent His Holy Spirit as a comforter. We all crave comfort and in Him we can know true comfort, even in times that are trying, difficult, or dark.
“But seek ye first the kingdom
Of God and His righteousness,
And all these things shall be
Added unto you.”
Matthew 6:33 NKJV
I believe that among these things are the “Fruits of the Spirit” given in given in the book of Galatians.
“But the fruit of the Spirit is
Love
Joy
Peace
Longsuffering
Kindness
Goodness
Faithfulness
Gentleness
Self-control.
Against these things
There is no law.”
Galatians 5:22-23 NKJV
No comments:
Post a Comment