Urgent or Really Important?

“ …but I focus on this one thing;” Apostle Paul in Philippians 3:13 New Living Translation

 Paul was a ‘one thinger.’ It wasn’t that he couldn’t do more than one thing. Only that the one thing he did was the main thing to him … the most important.

To him, not doing the ‘one thing’ couldn’t be made up for by doing everything else.

The Apostle’s life serves as a contrast to a statement I heard this morning in church. Here it is: You can become addicted to distractions.

 It’s safe to say that many things which crowd our lives and To Do lists … that infringe on our peace and quiet … that demand more and more of us … are not necessarily things that we should be giving our lives for.

To the Apostle the future was more important to him than his past. So much so, that he was willing to forget the past to concentrate on his future … on God’s future for him. It was hard to take Paul off target. He had sighted his life in and if he squinted, it wasn’t from trying to remember something in his past, but to enable him to see more clearly into what lay ahead.

There is, indeed, the tyranny of the urgent. More and more of our lives come under this classification and the cruel burden it produces. Others set our agendas, then hold the stopwatch to see if we are performing up to expectations. We feel the pressure to do more faster and do it more efficiently.

But the urgent and the important are seldom the same.

There is One who truly knows the difference. He lived an extremely busy life, yet never got sidetracked by the unimportant. He, like the Apostle Paul, found life’s code from his intimacy with the Father. When his schedule threatened to erupt into frenzied urgency, He would slip away to hear his Father’s voice and let his Father hear his.

It’s been said that if we don’t fill our time, someone else will do it for us. How very true that is. However, I don’t want to just have my time filled. I want God to set my agenda and my pace. I want his pauses, his spurts, his detours to control my actions and attitudes so that at the end of the day and end of my life there will be accomplishments, not just a pile of valueless activity.

The addiction to distractions needs to be broken.

 “The Lord will guide you continually, giving you water when you are dry


and restoring your strength. You will be like a well-watered garden, 
like an ever-flowing spring.”

Isaiah 58:11 New Living Translation

 “The Lord says, “I will guide you along the best pathway for your life.
 I will advise you

and watch over you.”  Psalm 32:8 New Living Translation