Lately I’ve been exploring meditation in an attempt to quiet my ever racing mind. I’ve also heard that prayer is you talking to God and meditation is you sitting back quietly to listen for His response. So now, instead of rambling on my long prayers and going about my day immediately after, I’ve tacked on some meditation time at the end of each prayer to listen to what God has to say back to me.
One day last week I set aside some very intentional quiet time to really get deep into the prayer and meditation. In so many words, the response that I got during my meditation was, “You’re doing too much.” This made so much sense because I’ve come to realize that I tend to over book myself. This doesn’t mean that I’m scheduling things at the same time, but I’m not really giving myself time to thoroughly breath, reflect, and rest in between appointments and engagements.
I’ve come to learn that just because a block of time is not filled on your calendar or in your day planner, it doesn’t mean that it’s really available. I’ve had days where I schedule appointments, book signings, meetings and calls back to back to back just because the space is free on my calendar. What I don’t account for is transitions, down time, travel time and the fact that I am not a robot and that I might just get tired somewhere along the way like humans often do.
When I was given the message that I was doing too much, an example was also revealed to me. Now that my business travel is beginning to slow up a bit, I’d decided that I was going to commit to thirty days of focus to tie up a lot of loose ends in my life. God was like, “Why does it have to be thirty days? Why can’t you just start by committing to like two days and see how it goes?” Again, this made so much sense for me because I definitely have a tendency to make grand plans, then I find myself either overwhelmed by them or disappointed with myself because I’ve abandoned them.
Another area where I tend to “do too much” is within my thoughts. I have formed a nasty little habit of sweating the small stuff, instead of focusing on the big picture. Sometimes we all stress ourselves out by thinking about, paying attention to and entertaining some of the most trivial things. Let’s use a dating situation as a common example of this…
A man and a woman are dating. The woman spends a lot of time and energy paying attention to all of the other young ladies that are attracted to or interested in her man. She overlooks the fact that she gets all of his time, attention and affection, and focuses on all of these women that are making comments on his Facebook page or following him on Twitter. Instead of focusing on the positive big picture, she is zeroed in on the insignificant small picture. My advice to here would be,” If you are the quarterback, why in the world are you worried about who’s on the bench?”
Do you see where I’m going with this?
This week I challenge you to UNDER Book yourself for a change and OVER Look the small stuff that doesn’t even matter in the larger scheme of things. As your personal guinea pig for positive change I can assure you that your life will begin to improve instantly.
