Saturday, June 20, 2009

Why do I do what I do?

So there was a huge wedding at my church today. Being the custodian, I am responsible for cleaning the building before and after the wedding. Now this wedding was giant. There were fancy lights and nice/contemporary music and of course.. Confetti Cannons! Confetti was EVERYWHERE. But I loved it! And I loved it the most because it was my friend's (Melanie and Steve's) wedding.

HOWEVER, had this been another person's wedding (or just a wedding for none whom I know), cleaning up that confetti would have bothered me. I would have complained and moaned about the inconvenience. I might have even posted a blog about it. But as I was cleaning the church and vacuuming up all that confetti, I found great joy. The work wasn't hard, and I had no desire to complain at all. I started thinking, "If only I felt this way about cleaning the church all the time." My willingness to clean the church for this wedding was at an all time high! and it was my heart's desire to prepare for it. Then started plotting to trick myself into thinking that I was always cleaning the church for Melanie's wedding.. because then cleaning the church would always be a joy, right?

Colossians 3:23 says, "Work willingly at whatever you do, as though you are working for the Lord rather than for people." (NLT)

I was starting to change this to "Work willingly at whatever you do as though you are working for melanie...." haha But here's the cool thing. If I can have joy about blessing melanie by cleaning the church, How much more joy can I have by doing it for the LORD?

Wednesday, June 10, 2009

Urgent or Important?

I took a class called Administration and Organization. yes it was as boring as it sounds... But I did learn some useful things. One of those things was how to tell to tell the difference between something that is urgent and something that is important. Something that is important may not necessarily be urgent and visaversa. There are times however when something is important and urgent or even times when something is neither.

Here's an example of a time when someone misunderstood the difference between urgent and important: I got a trillion (obvious exaggeration for effect) phone calls at a time when I was busy. The same person kept calling me over and over and over. I was wondering if i should get up and take the call but as the person wasn't leaving any messages (and I wasn't sure about the number) i decided to ignore it. Then I started getting these text pages, "Urgent call" and "please call me". The person was finally left me a message and I was able to step out at a convenient time to listen. When I listened to the message, not only was I relieved that nothing was wrong, but I was perturbed that this person would try and contact me so urgently for what seemed like a relatively small reason.

Though the matter may have been important it wasnt urgent enough to enduce a trillion phone calls and text messages.

Actually, if people focused on the difference between urgentness and importantness they would learn better time management skills, and they would feel less stressed. well.. I learned that the hard way through procrastination. anyway.

thats my rant.