Tuesday 16 October 2012

Tuesday - of Prioritizing and Blessings

Prayer:  Teach us,  Good and Loving God,  to serve You as You deserve.  Teach us to give and not to count the cost.  Teach us to fight and not to heed the wounds.  Remind us to toil and not to seek for rest,  to labour and not to ask for any reward,  save that of knowing that we do Your will.  Through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.  (FMP 1964).

Prioritizing.   Most if not all time management courses state that one can manage time better if one prioritizes one’s  projects and events.   Prioritizing means making a list of what needs to be accomplished.     For a lot of people,  this is a great tool and helps us figure out what is the most important project to tackle first and which project to tackle second.   But this is a tool that is  a chronos tool…. it provides us with time limits.   Sometimes our time limits become a burden.  The same way,  not making a list of prioritizing means suddenly burdening other people at the last minute when you can not accomplish your project all by yourself.
The comedian,  Jeanne Robertson,  has a wonderful skit about prioritizing.   She begins her skit by saying where she lives,  when someone gets sick or dies,  food is taken over to the family.  Jeanne specializes in making pound cakes.   One day a friend is sick and Jeanne goes to the freezer and alas,  there are no pound cakes in the freezer.    So Jeanne sends her husband to the grocery with a list of items to make pound cakes.  The only thing that her husband said was he had an important meeting that day so he wanted to be able to check out all the items on the list through the Express check out.
Finally after a very long time,  her husband returns from the grocery store with bags and bags of groceries.   She can’t figure why he is bringing in bags and bags of groceries when her list would have fit into only two grocery bags.  There were only seven items on her grocery list.  
As her husband keeps shuffling bags of groceries into the kitchen,  she finally finds the grocery list that she had given him with the list of pound cake items.
Jeanne finally realizes that for once and only once in her life,  in her eagerness to make sure that her husband could get through the express lane and get to his meeting on time,  she numbered the items on the grocery list.  There were seven items on the grocery list.  Unfortunately,  her husband purchased the number of items on her list in quantities.   One pound of butter.   Two bottles of Vanilla.  Three pounds of lard.  Four dozen eggs. Five bags of sugar.  Six bags of flour and seven bottles of 7-Up.
While this is a hilarious story,  it also is a wonderful example of what happens when we prioritize and the prioritizing takes over our life.   This is a wonderful example when making a list becomes overwhelming.  All one’s energy is used up in writing the list and then initiating the list.

Read Psalm 62: 1 – 8
My soul finds rest in God alone.  My salvation comes from God.  …. Trust in God at all times and pour your hearts to God, for God is our refuge.

In all things and in all listing making and prioritizing,  God is our refuge.   Our salvation comes from God.  

Today,  pour your heart out to God as  you prioritize your projects.    God is with us in everything that we do and say.

Prayer:  O God,  pour into our hearts a Love that only You can give.  Pour into our hearts a joy and only You can give.  Pour into our hearts the knowledge of the scriptures so that we remember that You are our refuge and our strength.  For this we say, Thank You.  Amen.

Many blessings.

No comments:

Post a Comment