Good morning and happy Saturday. We have reached the last weekend of January already. How is your year going so far? Are you doing all of the things that you had planned to do? Now is a good time to evaluate your plans and make adjustments if needed.
The other day I was jotting down some notes in my calendar. Yes, I am a dinosaur and still have a paper calendar that I use for a lot of my scheduling. I have always been a planner and I like to be able to write notes and flip through the pages. I also like to use sticky notes for temporary placeholders and move them as needed to balance out certain months. Being able to insert papers and stuff in it while they are in progress is an added bonus. Yes, I know that my computer, phone and tablet all have cool calendars that can be synced together, color-coded, send reminders, and other cool features. And I use that for certain things. However, my primary is an inexpensive paper calendar. Which is ok since most people with access to all of the newest calendar features still don’t use them or have a clue about actually planning. Oops, did I say that? Anyway, as I was making some notes, I remembered a calendar that I had purchased a long time ago. As you can imagine, it was also an inexpensive one purchased at a luxury retailer like Wal-Mart. Some might even use the word cheap. I prefer the term frugal. Anyways, I was busy one day transferring notes from some meeting. Among the doodles on the handout, extraneous notes about being bored out of my mind, and stuff like that, there were some actual dates that I needed to keep track of. I remember writing various things on the dates for a couple of months. But then I got confused. I had turned the page to another month and was trying to transfer the dates from the handout. For some reason they simply did not work. Everything seemed like it was off by a couple of days. At first, I thought I was on the wrong month. After checking, I concluded that I was trying to use the correct month. Nevertheless, the dates would not match. I was so confused. The dates for the previous month worked just fine. Why in the world did they not work when I turned to the next month? It is then I noticed that the prior month ended on a certain day of the week. Since I am old and the memory isn’t perfect, let’s just say for illustration purposes that it was a Thursday. When I turned the page to the next month, it had the dates beginning on Sunday, the first day of the week. Mystery solved. I hadn’t lost my mind at that point (although that is probably not verifiable). My inexpensive calendar was printed incorrectly. Therefore, it was not a useful tool for scheduling or making my life plans on. Fortunately, their printing error was contained to only one month, so I took a Sharpie and changed the dates. Now that is being frugal baby!
In all seriousness, life is like this illustration. Many people are making plans based on false assumptions. We assume the information we have heard from someone else, we read somewhere, or whatever is accurate. Therefore, we use it as part of the basis for building our lives upon. The world tells us that we need more and more and more. Many people believe that and spend their lives pursuing that very thing. I have heard people that justify blatant sin with the notion that, “God wants me to be happy.” The idea that you can do whatever you want to make yourself happy is what God intended is a false notion. So is the false ideology that God is loving so everyone will be ok in the end. If that were true, then there would have been no reason for Jesus to die on the cross for our sins. Of course, the idea of sin and responsibility has also been dismissed by many in our times. If it feels good, do it. If you aren’t hurting anyone else, it is ok. What you do isn’t anyone else’s business. Put yourself first. These are just a few ideas that are held as true by people. However, what we must figure our is whether that is accurate or not. We have to have something that is true and correct to guide us. If not, we are building our lives on shifting sand.
I conclude with the words of Jesus from Matthew 7:24-27:
24 “Therefore, everyone who hears these words of mine and acts on them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock. 25 The rain fell, the rivers rose, and the winds blew and pounded that house. Yet it didn’t collapse, because its foundation was on the rock. 26 But everyone who hears these words of mine and doesn’t act on them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. 27 The rain fell, the rivers rose, the winds blew and pounded that house, and it collapsed. It collapsed with a great crash.” (Matthew 7:24-27)
So, what are you building your life upon?
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