"And He has given us a treasure called right now, And this is the only moment we can do anything about"~Steven Curtis Chapman
When I look back over my life so far, the best and worse decisions that I have made have always been preceded by that feeling of “there is something not quite right here.” You feel your stomach start to sink, your heart rate increases, and it’s as if you need to change something.
My wife is better at tuning into this feeling than I am. Dave Ramsey says it’s natural for women to be more in tune with this “feeling.” He goes on to say that you better listen to your wife when she gets one of those “feelings.” I would have to say that Dave is right, when I go against one of her “feelings” I know that we are going to pay for it down the road.
I have tried more and more to be in tune with “that sinking feeling.” My problem is that it always causes second guessing on my part. These feelings can quickly go away as well. I mean they can be triggered by the smallest of things.
Maybe it’s a friend that sends you a new opportunity that you may be interested in. But you’re happy in your current role. . . aren’t you?
Maybe it is something that your manager emails to you, or says in a meeting the doesn’t sit quite right with you.
Maybe someone says something about someone else being wronged—but that won’t ever happen to you or someone that you love.
For me, like most of you, when things are great in life, there is very little that will make us want to change what we are doing. I mean there is really no need to upset the apple cart and try to make things better. There really is no reason to pray to God and be ever so grateful, God will be there when things get rough. . .right? ? ?
All of this is perfectly understandable, a majority of us react this way. The problem is that this method is not very useful when things do get rough (and they will). When times get tough and you live like this, you grow soft and loose the willpower to achieve the the impossible.
I try to live differently because of the Hope that I have. I try to live differently because I am living for so much more. My wife sometimes calls me an optimist, I call myself a realistic optimist.
I have had a few “sinking feelings” in my life that I really needed to address. From the outside looking in, everything would have seemed to be going great. Paying attention to “that sinking feeling” eventually led to great things — because I headed its warning, and prayed for wisdom. Marriage, career, kids, moving out of sate — call these came from “that sinking feeling.”
No matter how small or insignificant you think your thought is, it is always worth exploring and praying about. This will help you act on your situation. It’s amazing that God gives us this instrument that is so finely tuned, something that I will never understand. Don’t suppress the "sinking feeling” until the situation becomes a mountain of impossibility. God gave you the mechanism to alert you. Embrace them and you will make the most of your opportunities.
Listen to what is stirring inside of you. Pray and act in the little moments. Make the small changes and adjustments to your life and to the lives of those around you as needed. Do them for the right reasons.
Years ago my wife and I began the journey to become wise financially and to pay our debt off. We went through Financial Peace University to learn about our finances. We went because we both had “that sinking feeling” that if we don’t get a grip on this now, our finances will own us for the rest of our lives. We took that cue, prayed about it, and sought wisdom. It would have been easy to ignore our concerns and just brush it off saying, “everyone else is buying stuff, charging stuff, not budgeting,” but we met the situation head on. It ended with us happening to our money instead of our money happening to us. We now help others seeking financial freedom by leading Financial Peace University at our home.
You have to live that way. Listen to that “sinking feeling,” pray about it. . .and then don’t just sit there. Be proactive and seek after the wise council God has placed in your life. Deal with the small stuff while it is still small stuff, and then the BIG stuff will sort itself out.
0 comments:
Post a Comment