devotions

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New Year’s Eve Plans

Wow, the end of another year! It came up quickly and we had no plans as usual.

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Well, I guess we did have plans; they were the same plans we have most years on New Year’s Eve: we hang out, snack a little, and watch some New Year’s Eve countdown show on TV.

That’s pretty much it. There have been a few years where we’ve varied our pattern but this is the regular “no plan” plan for the end of the year.

But I was leaning away from that plan this year, and it was all because of a TV advertisement for a New Year’s Eve show this year.

I saw an ad for this year’s New Year’s Eve show on ABC called, “Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve”.

The problem with this show is that Dick Clark is no longer with us. In fact, he’s been gone for over two years now. What kind of a New Year’s show is it when the host of the show is not really ringing in the new year with you?

How great a new year can it be if the host isn’t joining you in the celebration?

There is just something wrong about it, that almost says there’s nothing worth looking forward to in the new year.

Maybe the executives at ABC are getting older and don’t have the same optimism as they used to, so why not have a deceased person’s name on the advertising? Nothing spells excitement like that!

I had in mind we should change things up this year. It was kind of late to be making plans with only three days to the big day, but I thought we needed to make the night a little more interesting and add a little hope to the evening.

The problem with putting more effort into NYE is that it happens so often that you blink and it’s here again. And you start to think, “Didn’t we just have New Year’s not that long ago?”

That’s what age does though; it speeds up time for you. A year for someone in their 50’s is like a year and a half for someone in their 20’s.

When you’re in your 20’s you can barely remember the last new year’s, and so it’s a big deal every time it comes around.

But when you get a little older, you feel like you just booked your dinner reservations for last December 31, and now you have to do it again already.

When you’re young, a new year offers all kinds of new opportunities and hopes, but when you’re older you just hope things will hold their own in the new year and there won’t be any surprises.

When you think of it, New Year’s Eve is really for the young, or the young at heart.

After some thought, we changed up our plans and went out … but still made it home in time to watch “Dick Clark’s postmortem New Year’s Rockin’ Eve.”

Here’s the thing: If the sound of giving in to getting older doesn’t seem all that good to you, then fight to stay young at heart. Get out of your rut and breathe some hope and excitement into your routines like New Year’s Eve. And while you’re at it, take a look at your relationship with God – have you gotten safe, comfortable, boring with God? Look at this new year as an opportunity to enhance your relationship with God. Consider how you can engage with God in more hope and opportunity.

That’s Life!

Paul

Question: What did you do on New Year’s Eve this year? Leave your comments below.

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How To Stay On Track

I’ve been doing some goal setting for 2015. Now all I have to do is implement and stay on track.

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… That’s easier said than done because by mid-February I’ll have pretty much forgotten about the goals I set for the year. Even if I do have a fading memory of them, I’ll have no recollection of when I’m to do them.

In my last two blogs, I talked about why we need to set goals in “It’s Time to Look Ahead To Next Year” (read it here). Then in “It’s All About What We Believe” (read it here), I talked about how our limiting beliefs keep us from completing our goals and, in some cases, from even setting them.

When you set goals they have to be realistic, achievable, and clear enough that you know when you’ve accomplished them.

The whole process is helped by having a reason why you want to accomplish the goal (identifying your motivation) and a next step to achieving that goal.

This is important because a goal might look too daunting to reach but if you break it down into the next little step, moving on that goal seems much more doable.

All this looks great on paper, but when you are two weeks into the new year, or three months along, you need more than that.

And that’s why reviewing is so necessary. But reviewing doesn’t just happen on its own.

You really need to figure out how you’re going to keep these goals in front of you, on your radar all year long.

For me, this is a big deal so I put some time into coming up with a way to review my goals so they never get so far from my frontal lobe that they end up just swimming around in the back of my brain somewhere, never to be found again.

I’ve done two things that will help keep my goals front and centre all year: I’ve made a list of my goals and I’ve put them in a reminder application that pops up on my computer screen once a week.

This way I can look at all my goals each week and quickly decide what my next step will be in moving forward with each one.

I’ve set my reminder to show up on Saturdays at 8 am – that’s when I have some available time and it won’t take me too long to review.

I also have a to-do list where I record my next step for each goal. My to-do app “Nozbe” (read about it here) is open every day, so when the next step for a goal is scheduled to be worked on, it will pop up in my app and then I can put it on my agenda for the day.

This is all good in theory. Over the course of this year I’ll see if it works out as well as I’m anticipating it will.

Here’s the thing: Like keeping goals in the front of your mind all year, keeping a daily commitment to God on your mind all year needs some kind of review process. If you’re going to read through the Bible in a year, you need a system to track your progress and a reminder to make sure you don’t forget about staying on top of it. I use the You Version Bible app and it does both for me.

That’s Life!

Paul

Question: What do you use to keep you on track with your Bible reading? Leave your comment below.

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It’s All About What We Believe

In my last post, I wrote about setting goals for the new year (click hear to read). In this one, I am going to share a secret that helps me do that. In my next post, I’ll share another secret.

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Normally goal setting starts with dreaming of all the things you might want to accomplish. You brainstorm a million ideas, then select the best ones.

But I didn’t start there – I started in a place I had no desire to go.

I began with evaluating my limits … to be more precise, my limiting beliefs. And that’s very different from my limits.

I’m limited by a lot of things. I could blame my parents that I’m not six feet tall or have the mind of a rocket scientist. But that’s just genetics. I can’t do anything about that.

Everyone has limits.

But limiting beliefs, that’s a different matter. They are not really limits; they’re just a bar we set for ourselves that we don’t think we can get over.

The problem with those limiting beliefs is that we live up to them all the time … or should I say, we live under them every time.

What’s worse is they aren’t necessarily true; we just believe them to be true (limiting beliefs like, “I can’t do that”, “I’m a failure”, “No one cares”).

When it comes to goal setting, they keep us from accomplishing the goals we want to reach.

In the past, my limiting beliefs have been the mastermind behind me sabotaging my own goals.

They come from stories I’ve created based on my past experiences. Still, I believe the stories and live them out time and time again.

These limiting beliefs are ingrained in us and you can only change them by replacing them with new stories – a new story that overwrites the old one.

That’s not easy to do.

But this week as I was listing my limiting beliefs, I found a key to begin the process of overwriting those limiting beliefs.

It starts with a truth. Then you have to trust the truth enough to experience that truth in your life and thus write a new story.

It sounds simple but it takes some work.

For me, two truths from the Bible that I read right after I wrote my limiting beliefs will help me write some new stories.

1 John 5:14-15 says, “This is the confidence we have in approaching God: that if we ask anything according to his will, he hears us. And if we know that he hears us—whatever we ask—we know that we have what we asked of him.” (NIV84)

We can ask God to help us overcome our limiting beliefs. He will hear us and answer.

Then Ephesians 3:20 says “Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us,”(NIV84)

Now that’s powerful! Whatever you believe about yourself – whatever I have come to believe about myself – God is at work within us and can do more than we can even imagine.

The first step is to believe these truths, and then go out and experience the reality of them. If you do, you’ll replace that old story, with a new one.

Here’s the thing: If you want to grow deeper with God, if you want to see God work in your life, then address those limiting beliefs by believing and experiencing these truths from God’s words. Then write a new story through experience.

That’s Life!

Paul

Question: Do you have limiting beliefs that hold you back from all God wants for you? Leave your comment below.

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It’s Time to Look Ahead To Next Year

It’s that time once again to start looking ahead to what the next year will bring. And what it will bring is much more of what happened this year!

goal-setting

Now if that doesn’t sound all that appealing, then maybe it’s time to set some goals for 2015.

“Goals” – that’s a nasty word, isn’t it? Setting goals is often like setting oneself up to fail. Goals take thought, planning and following through. There’s a lot of work that goes into setting goals.

They’re not like scoring a goal in hockey. Those goals come suddenly, sometimes with no planning and not much effort. Sometimes you can score a goal just by being in the right place at the right time (with your stick on the ice, of course).

But setting goals – whether they are personal, career or family oriented – doesn’t come all that easily.

For many years I didn’t really set goals for the new year. As a pastor, the flow of ministry is more in line with a school year, so I make preaching plans from September to August.

I’ve never been one who makes New Year’s resolutions because to me they are nothing more than some good thoughts no one’s going to follow through on. I know I certainly won’t.

But last year I took an online goal setting seminar and set some goals for 2014. Now in December looking back, I accomplished many of them.

It was a positive experience so I’m going through the seminar again this year and am now in the midst of setting some new goals for 2015.

I’d like to say I met and exceeded all the goals I set for this past year but that only happened in my dream yesterday morning.

In reviewing my goals, I now see that two may have been a little unrealistic, and one I just never got down to working on.

That doesn’t mean I failed. I accomplished most of my goals and what I’m really pleased about is that three of them I didn’t start until six months into the year.

But having said that, this year I hope to improve. I think I know some key areas I can focus on to ensure I do.

One area is addressing my limiting beliefs. Limiting beliefs are beliefs about yourself that hold you back from accomplishing things you would like to do.

These beliefs will keep you from setting some goals you should set, and prevent you from accomplishing or completing some goals that you do set.

A second area that I am going to give more focus to this year is keeping my goals on my radar all year long.

You can set great goals at the beginning of the year, but if you don’t keep reviewing them, you easily forget about those goals you weren’t planning on starting right away.

In my next two blogs I’m going to write about how I’m addressing these two areas of my goal setting so that I have greater results than I did this year.

Here’s the thing: We have this great resource that tells us about God and His will for us called the Bible. However, most of us don’t refer to it very much. We use it more like a manual that you pull out when you need to figure out how to do something. We don’t actually read it. As we approach 2015, let me encourage you to set a goal of reading through God’s Word this year. Pick a reading plan, and commit to reading through God’s great book for you.

That’s Life!

Paul

Question: What’s your biggest blockage to reading through the Bible? Leave your comment below.

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My Free Time Got Fried!

Why is it that when time is freed up from one thing, it is so easily filled by something else?

Cool-Polar-Bear-Photos-Im-not-lazy.-Im-just-highly-motivated-to-do-nothing.

When you get a break from a regular task or project that gives you all kinds of freedom to work on something else. But what invariably happens is other things and people come along, take bits of that freed up time and leave you with nothing.

I’m not sure anyone else experiences this phenomenon but it happens to me every time I get a break from preaching.

The last two weeks I haven’t had to speak on Sunday which freed up a large amount of time I would spend studying and writing sermons.

That freedom was welcomed because I have some extra events around Christmas, some planning for early in the new year and a sermon to have ready a couple of days after Christmas.

So, though I did not have to preach, I had lots I needed to work on – the freed up time was something I needed.

However, now that I’m at the end of those two weeks, I didn’t get done nearly what I needed to and the hopes of having an easy, no pressure, leisurely Christmas is kind of out the window right now.

There are a few reasons why this happens to me, and I can pretty much predict it to happen every time I get a break from sermon prep.

First, I feel a little freer than normal. Without that thought in the back of my mind of needing to have a message ready for next Sunday, I kind of let my guard down.

I don’t protect my time as much as I do when I have to write a sermon. I will chat with people longer, and be open to making appointments at times I never would if I was working on a message for Sunday.

Secondly, I find that I am less focussed. I might be working on something but then become aware of something else that needs my attention. I will drop what I was working on and start plugging away on this new interest.

I’ll know that I shouldn’t be spending the time on this new project, but my lack of focus keeps me drifting from one thing that catches my fancy to something else.

Thirdly, I find I’m just not as motivated as when I have a sermon to produce. There is something about having the pressure of a deadline that keeps you moving in that direction. But when the pressure is gone, sometimes the motivation is missing too.

What it all comes down to is discipline. When I let my guard down, or am less focussed, or not very motivated, what it really means is I have not disciplined myself to use my time in the best possible way.

Man, next week is going to be busy!

Here’s the thing: When you get out of routine with God, whether that is attending church, spending time with Him alone, serving Him in some capacity, or learning more about Him by yourself or with others, what you find is that time gets used up by other things. If you don’t discipline yourself with God, you will find that you let your guard down to other things, you are less focussed on Him and you lack motivation for God. Stay disciplined.

That’s Life!

Paul

Question: What gets in the way of your routine with God? Leave your comment below.

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Bring On Christmas!

Well, our house is finally decorated for Christmas. It has been about a two week process. We’ve lived in a Christmas construction zone in that time, with boxes and decorations lying in wait to be placed where they need to be.

Christmas Decorations

It’s not just the living room that needs to be decorated, our family room gets almost as much glitter and lights as the upstairs.

For me, I’m glad that it’s all finished now because the in-between stage looks so unfinished and I really don’t like the clutter.

For two weeks I haven’t been able to walk around our pool table and if I need to get in a few more steps for the day, I need that space to pace around in.

But now everything is in place where it should be and the Christmas work site has now turned into a beautiful scene of lights, ornaments and ribbon. Lily’s happy with it and that makes me happy.

Not that I really contributed to the putting up of all the decorations – she has an idea of what she wants to do and I’d probably mess things up if I got involved … at least that’s what I’ve convinced myself of.

Sunday afternoon I sat down on the couch and ended up taking a well-deserved nap. When I awoke, Lily had just finished that last touches on the decorations. I figured I woke up just in time.

She asked what I thought and I said it all looked great. I think she was looking for something more, maybe something more flowery or possibly a “I’ll help take it all down”, but the best I could offer at the time was “great job, dear”.

Hey, I was still waking up.

It’s not like I don’t do anything to contribute to the Christmassy look around our house. I put up the lights outside … and Lil doesn’t help me with them.

I have to risk life and limb going up on a ladder to string the lights along the garage eavestrough and then use an extension ladder to secure the lights along the peak of our roofline.

I don’t see her needing a ladder to put her newly spray-painted star on top of the tree … well maybe a step stool.

I was able to get all my decorating done in one afternoon and not the two weeks that we have had to wade through the junk.

But it’s all good now. We are ready for this season we call Christmas.

The decorations are just a mood-setter for what the season is all about. I think the trimmings trigger memories and alter our mood to usher in a most special time of year where we celebrate the birth of Jesus, God’s Son, who came to restore us to God.

Here’s the thing:  Like decorating for Christmas moves us into experiencing the season with a greater depth of feeling, taking time in the next couple of weeks to focus your attention on Jesus and His birth will move you to cherish Him more. The thing is, like putting up the decorations takes effort, take effort to spend some time in God’s Word around the miracle of the Messiah’s birth.

That’s Life!

Paul

Question: How much effort goes into preparing for your Christmas? Leave your comment below.

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From Bad News To Work Out Room

I wrote earlier this fall about some bad news I got from my doctor. I had had a blood test, waited about three weeks, and thought I was in the clear, only to have my doctor pull me aside one day and tell me my cholesterol was high.

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I cringed, of course, but I kind of knew it – I had been pretty liberal with my snacking in the last while.

Since then I started to change my eating patterns. I wrote about this in a September blog called, “Difficult Choice” (your can read it here).

In that time, I’ve lost about 10 or so pounds. I say “or so” because on a given day I can go up or down as much as three and a half pounds.

It’s kind of crazy – I’m not sure if it’s my scale that’s lying to me or whether the pizza I had the other night really did put 3 pounds on me!

The thing is, I’ve been doing this for about three months and I think I’ve kind of hit a wall. I don’t seem to be able to get past the 10 or so pounds and go lower to reach my goal.

It’s time to start phase two of my plan. However, phase two requires Lily’s help.

No, I’m not asking her to make certain foods for me, or spot me when I lift weights, I need her to agree to let me purchase a rowing machine. I’ve wanted one for two years now since I took a  cardiac rehab course.

At the clinic they had a rowing machine and I really got hooked on that piece of equipment.  However, they are not cheap. I’ve wanted one but no one has sprung the cash to get me one for my birthday or anything.

Well that is until now. Somehow, without any real arm-twisting on my part, Lil thought we could make it a Christmas present to each other.

It’s really going to cut down on gift wrap this year, and Christmas morning we’re not going to have much to open because we ordered it and it’s already arrived!

My son had been telling people for ages that he no longer had a bedroom at our house, that we had turned it into a workout room. But all I had previously done was stick a weightlifting bench in the middle of all his stuff.

Now Mike has a real case for telling people he has no bedroom at home. I’ve taken his old room, cleared out most of the debris, set up my mountain bike on a trainer, put a weight bench in the room … and now have a brand new rowing machine as well!

My new gym room is nicer than many hotel workout rooms. And I’m counting on it to help me get past the 10 pound barrier and on to my goal.

Here’s the thing: To ensure I stay physically healthy, I’ve had to take some significant measures. What I was doing wasn’t getting me to where I needed to be. Your spiritual life is the same. You can’t just keep the same devotional time with God that you began with. To get where God wants you to be, you need to take measures to make your time with God more impacting on your life. You have to up your commitment level to spiritual growth.

That’s Life!

Paul

Question: What have you started that you realize you need to up your commitment level to? Leave your comment below.

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Hold That Thought

What do you do when you get a brainwave while you’re doing something else? By the time you can get back to that brilliant idea, it’s gone . . . long gone!

nozbe app

I’ve had that happen to me more than I can remember . . .  See? Even the concept of it has been wiped from my memory.

More than once I’ve been sleeping, only to be woken by a thought regarding the sermon I’m working on.

For some people having a thought in the middle of sleep is more like an hallucination. The thought is wild and fanciful and usually the result of eating bad pizza late at night.

For me it’s usually really insightful. Many times I’ve said to myself in my half dazed state, “I have to remember this”, but by the time morning comes, I’ve forgotten it.

This has also happened to me during the day when I’m awake and doing something – like, for instance, today, this morning, just fifteen minutes ago!

I was starting this blog, wondering what I would write about, when I got this great thought that pertained to my daughter, something that I felt she needed to know for a particular issue she was dealing with.

The idea was good and I really wanted to move on it. I wanted to stop the blog and immediately call my daughter. But I was torn because I wanted to complete writing my blog and not get out of that writing mode I was in.

So this is what I’ve learned to do: I write my great idea down so that I won’t forget it, and so that I can schedule a time to act on it.

When this happens in the middle of the night, I have my phone by my bed. I will quickly type a memo to myself and then go back to sleep.

Sometimes I’m too tired to write so I use the voice recognition in the app. I just record my thought and the app types what I say. Then I can refer back to it when I am actually awake.

This morning I really had to fight the urge to put my blog down and contact Karlie right away. In this case I used an app on my computer called Nozbe. It is a sophisticated to-do list manager that I keep open all the time.

Once my idea is written down, it’s saved for me to get back to when I have the time, or when I decide to schedule following up on it.

It’s a great solution to not let those good ideas get away on you.

This morning I’m calling Karlie right after I finish this blog.

Here’s the thing:  God may prompt you of a sin or instruction in the midst of a conversation or at a time you’re doing something completely unrelated. Instead of forgetting all about it, simply note it in a silent prayer to God, right then and there. Ask for forgiveness, or guidance, or help. You don’t have to use proper sentences or proper English (Brits say we never use proper English!). Acknowledge you’ve heard God right away; you will be able to follow it up later.

That’s Life!

Paul

Question: Have you forgotten great ideas that came to you in the middle of the night? Leave your comment below.

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Perfect In The Moment

Have you ever been perfect? I don’t mean getting a perfect score on an exam – you just have to study hard to know the answers. I mean, have you ever done something perfectly?

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Maybe you assembled a BBQ and there were no extra parts left over. You marvelled over your feat … but that doesn’t really count if you had the instructions in front of you.

To be perfect in that, you would have to put the BBQ together with all the parts in the right place and nothing left over, WITHOUT using the instructions.

Now that would be perfect. It would also be impossible.

Being perfect is actually doing the impossible.  We are not perfect people; we all have some flaw … some more than others. But perfect we are not.

So when you find yourself being perfect, it does cause you to pause and cherish the moment, because it probably won’t ever happen again.

I’m telling you this because I was perfect a couple of weeks ago. It was just for a moment; it was over in a flash.

I didn’t even realize I was perfect until three days after my great accomplishment. In fact, I was already not perfect again by the time I found out I was perfect.

Have I got you hypnotized yet? Well let me tell you how it all happened.

I’m in a football pool. It’s not a high stakes, money laundering, loan sharking, football pool. It’s just for fun. No money at stake, the winner just gets the satisfaction of winning.

All we do is pick the winning teams from about 13 different football games each week. Oh ya, and they’re from three different leagues: US college games, NFL games and CFL games.

This pool has been going for the past nine years. And in the words of the league secretary, “… never before – not once – in our history has a franchise owner had a perfect weekend during the regular season. We’ve had 1 loss and plenty of 2 loss weekends, but NEVER HAS ANYONE HAD A PERFECT WEEKEND” (emphasis mine).

That’s right, I was perfect that weekend! I picked all the winners that week. And I did this with no manual, no insider information, not even a secret formula.

It was all pure luck – I mean, perfection.

I have to tell you, I felt pretty special for about 30 seconds after I read the announcement in my email. But I was alone at the time so I just got back to working on my sermon or something.

But as perfect as I was for that brief moment, my son was able to bring me down with a few words: “Dad you should have bought a sports lottery ticket. With those picks you would have won a lot of money.”

So what if I could have made millions, well, maybe thousands? What’s really important is I was perfect for that moment. No one can take it from me, and it probably won’t happen again.

Here’s the thing: Those times when you encounter God in a truly special way, in a way that only He can bring about, cherish those moments. Remember them. You’ll be able to find encouragement in them when you’ve lost your motivation. Those moments will give you strength to continue in times of difficulty. Supernatural times when God is so close and personal may not come every day, but they will always be crystal clear in your mind.

That’s Life!

Paul

Question: What encounter have you had with God that you will never forget? Leave your comment below.

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How Blocked Shots Prevent Success

I went to a hockey game last night – it was an OHL game between the Kingston Frontenacs and the Owen Sound Attack.

New Jersey Devils v Philadelphia Flyers

You might think by their name that the team from Owen Sound was on the attack all night. But the opposite was true. Kingston had double the shots on goal and the play was decidedly in the Owen Sound end. It was like Kingston was on the attack for much of the night.

However, in the end Kingston lost in overtime. The Fronts outplayed the Attack and outshot them too, but they couldn’t outscore them … and in the end, that’s what counts.

The difference seemed to be all in the Owen Sound zone. They were on the defence for sure, but what they did on defence was pretty remarkable.

They blocked shots like a mother hen protecting her babies from the attack of a wolf. The Owen Sound players not only got their sticks in the way, but their legs and bodies too. I’m sure that Kingston might have had double the shots if it hadn’t have been for the Owen Sound defenders.

It must have been frustrating for our boys. They would come down and make a nice rush only to have a shot go off a player’s left shin pad and miss the net entirely.

I’ve preached sermons like that where I thought I had a great message. I was all excited about giving it. I had great illustrations, my points flowed together beautifully. But in the end, I felt like the congregation left with a shrug of their shoulders.

There was something missing, something that was preventing the message from getting through to the people and I didn’t know what it was.

It took me a few weeks, but I figured it out. There was something blocking the Holy Spirit from penetrating the hearts of the people in church. They were just getting my words, but no power that comes from the Holy Spirit.

My words weren’t making it through to the hearts of the congregation.

In the game last night, it was easy to tell that the Fronts needed to get more clean shots on the goalie. But that is something that will take some time to perfect. They will have to do drills and practice moving the puck around to get an open player a clean shot.

In the case of my sermon, it is just a matter of prayer, and continual prayer, for God to remove blockages and distractions so that the Holy Spirit’s power can work in hearts.

Here’s the thing: There may be times when you hear a sermon, or spend time with God and nothing seems to be getting through. It’s dull, routine, boring, and you may even be distracted.  That’s a good time to pray for God to remove Satan’s blockage so that the Holy Spirit can work in you.

That’s Life!

Paul

Question: When have you felt that your good work has come up against a blockage? Leave your comments below.