Getting Back to the Important Things

Yesterday and today I have had the privilege of spending two days away from all of my jobs - paid and unpaid - and have been attending the Catalyst leaders conference in Atlanta, Georgia. It has been a very challenging two days and while there have been a number of very informative and challenging talks given, there has not been one session of one speaker that has really shaken me, but it seems that God is using a number of the sessions to drop in a couple of lines of the picture. I thought I would jot down where I was as of tonight.

Yesterday one line that was going over and over in my head was this - we have replaced the important with the urgent. A simple statement but a very indicting statement when you delve into it. Essentially what the speaker was saying through this statement was that we have some very important things to do and things that we should be giving our lives to. There are things that we are involved in that are so important that we should be setting them as priorities and yet we have not given these important things the place that we should. We have allowed ourselves to be distracted by the latest Twitter feed, or the latest Facebook status update, or the latest Facebook game, or the latest e-mail - these are the urgent things. Through our social networking and our drive to be on top of everything we have allowed ourselves to take our eyes off of the important things in life and move from one crisis e-mail to the next, from one Twitter post to the next and we spend all of our time on the urgent.

The result can be devastating. We take a normal work day and clutter it up with urgent work and we fail to give the important work any of our time. The important work will be the work that will last. This is the life changes that we see in people's lives - if we take the time to spend time with them. If we fill our day with urgent work then we squeeze out the important and we miss out on what God has for us.

As I thought about this line, another one came to mind - "We need to fight for our families". God has placed us in families and He does not expect us to be perfect, but He wants to write His story of grace and transformation on our family. God wants to take our broken families and write His story through them as He restores them, as He builds them, as He heals the dysfunction. We need to stop trying to write our own story for our family and create the perfect 2.2 children family picture and allow God to create His family picture using our families as the lead characters.

As I pondered these two statements I was struck by a very painful truth about our church and the latest discussions that I have been involved in. We are in the process of preparing our 2010 budget and there have been discussions on costs for this and costs for that. We have discussed air conditioning and grass cutting and fought to include or exclude such items from the budget (depending on your view point). What brought me to tears during this evening's sessions was that while we fight over air conditioning, I know of at least 4 families where the husband and wife partnership is in disarray and for some has become separation. We are fighting over air conditioning and we are not fighting for our families. We are fighting over how much money to spend on grass cutting and no-one is talking about how much we should be investing into our people to help heal their marriages. We are fighting for the urgent and we have failed to see that we have set aside the important.

God please forgive me for placing the urgent in front of the important. Please forgive me for fighting over air conditioning and not fighting for our families. Help me Lord to lean all of my leadership, all of my influence, all of my energy into fighting to restore families and not wasting time on the urgent.