Yesterday I took my grandson home after church and we tackled my store and lock. I had a pick up truck bed full of items to go in the unit and I knew there wasn’t enough room. I had been putting off (procrastinating) removing some items and delivering them to the rightful owner. It’s a long story that doesn’t deserve telling here. Nicky and I tackled the problem, removed the offending items, called the owner, and delivered the items. Bad news is that I then had room for the new stuff that should have probably been thrown away, but is now safely in storage. The entire evolution took a couple of hours at the most. I had put it off for over a year. I have ignored the fact that even having a store and lock is an act of procrastination. It is a sign we are putting off throwing away things that we really don’t need. We just stick them in storage. Later, maybe much later, we’ll get around to throwing them away. It’s kind of like left-overs. At our house we have the procedure of putting left overs in the fridge, growing a little mold and then, when there is no room left, throwing them out.
I don’t know why I do that. It’s so much easier to tackle a problem head on, when it first rears it’s ugly head. Not only is the job done, but you spare yourself the hours of painful worry about getting it done. About the only person I know that doesn’t seem to do this is my daughter. Probably growing up with me instilled in her a determination not to repeat my errors. Probably not the best child raising technique; but what works…works.
In psychology, procrastination refers to the act of replacing high-priority actions with tasks of low-priority, and thus putting off important tasks to a later time. Not only do we do unimportant daily life things before things we need to do. But the sad thing is that the material things in our lives at least stare us in the face and force us to at least think about doing what needs to be done. The spiritual stuff is so much easier to ignore. Consider all the things we know we should be doing, but we have put off starting. Beginning a morning devotional, starting a family prayer time, witnessing to somebody…anybody, inviting someone to church, maybe going back to church, encouraging our pastor, encouraging our children’s workers… It’s an endless list. It’s a list of opportunities we haven’t faced. I know I can’t be the only one.
Let’s do this today. Let’s pick one spiritual thing we have been promising ourselves and Our Lord we would do and…. wait for it…. actually do it.
Do something good for yourself and
Be blessed.
Nick
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