Priorities Day

Watch out trash can! Here comes a load of social busy work headed for the land­fill! Today is pri­or­i­ties day. It is a day in which I give away or just toss things that get in the way of my ulti­mate pur­pose (includ­ing all of my life’s mis­takes). My tac­tics are bru­tal. When you pick up a cross, there is not much energy left for stuff. The cross is a metaphor. It is your one per­sonal load that makes the final dif­fer­ence. That dif­fer­ence is the prac­tice of the few things that really work in the long run. Among the stack of papers on my desk, I must dis­cern what mat­ters and what does not. (For exam­ple: I can­not remem­ber when I last read a church newslet­ter sent through the mail via a bulk mail sys­tem. If some­thing does not come to me first class with a hand-written or typed address, is it not worth my attention.)

You should see what I am doing with my time sched­ule. Read­ing, peo­ple, prayer/meditation, writ­ing, and the nec­es­sary tasks of my pro­fes­sion make the list pretty con­sis­tently. The qual­ity test pretty much elim­i­nates a whole slew of non-essentials. I enjoy a good movie, but I am not likely to learn or care much about the actors’ per­sonal lives. The same test goes for pop cul­ture in gen­eral and espe­cially the pop news phe­nom­e­non. I am proud to be a dis­mal fail­ure at Triv­ial Pur­suit. It does not mat­ter to me that an air­line flight atten­dant went nuts some­where. I do not have to know what every­one on the planet is doing every minute of the day. I have not checked my Twit­ter account in a year. Most peo­ple swim or drown in infor­ma­tion; I pre­fer to surf it.

Truly suc­cess­ful peo­ple do a few things well. They are good at ignor­ing things that do not make a sub­stan­tive dif­fer­ence. “Focus” is their hall­mark. They have a healthy respect for their lim­i­ta­tions. Most of all, they have the amaz­ing abil­ity not to fol­low the herd. While the masses are being mes­mer­ized by manip­u­la­tive pol­i­tics and other amuse­ments, they are build­ing a per­sonal “ark” (a means of actu­ally thriv­ing and hav­ing a sig­nif­i­cant future). I inten­tion­ally live below my means so that I can hear God’s call in my life. Hear­ing God means being still enough inside to dis­cern the times. To do so I have to elim­i­nate all sorts of shal­low inter­nal and exter­nal elements.

That is all I need to say. You are intel­li­gent. You get the gist. Grab your cross.