Your Pastor Speaks: Living the intentional life

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Have you ever noticed how much more you accomplish in a day with a To Do List vs. living life on autopilot? In reality, we do accomplish more when we are deliberately intentional about it. It’s not every day that we wake up bursting with energy to conquer the world. In our scheduled driven lives, dates on a calendar drive our commitment. The intentional life is not about the busy life, but the intentional life is about making time for the things that really matters.

How often do we think about taking that much needed vacation? For sure, it will never happen unless we make it happen. One way of looking at it, is life managing you, or are you managing life? Living intentionally is about living a balanced life with no regrets. From the beginning of time in the Genesis’ accounting of human history, God tells man to reproduce, multiple, and make things happen creatively. That being said, schedule overload and the busy life is not always a productive life. In that same creation story we are also told that Sabbath is a very necessary part of living intentionally. In living intentionally we take time to exhale, to smell the coffee and the roses. So how do we live the life we were created to live? According to John Maxwell, “There are two great days in a person’s life. The day they are born and the day they discover why.”

Oftentimes we settle for what life has handed us verses choosing the life we were created to live. I was taught by a wise mentor that “if you don’t like your life, you can change it.” Unfortunately, in life if we aim at nothing we are guaranteed to hit nothing. If we are not hitting our targets, we should try simplifying the targets. Targets are simply the goals that drive us toward a destination. A motto to live by is “never let a circumstance define or limit you. We often find life’s rewards when we push through boundaries and step outside of comfort zones. I firmly believe that life should be deliberately lived. According to Erwin Raphael McManus in The Last Arrow, he says: “When you come to the end of your days, you will not measure your life based on success and failures… what will haunt you until your final breath is who you could have been but never became and what you could have done but never did.”

Life in the autopilot lane leaves too much of life to chance. John Maxwell says it best, he says that “Intentional people fill their own calendar. They don’t allow others to fill their calendar.” When it comes to the things that really matter, we should strive to be intentional in word and in deed. In life we will all end up somewhere, but intentional people will end up somewhere on purpose.

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Kimberly Strain

Your Pastor Speaks

Rev. Kimberly Strain is pastor of Outreach Christian Center in Delaware.

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