Pray and Don't Give Up

Hey there, glad you stopped by. Welcome to Monday Morning Motivation.

I do these posts each most Mondays as a sort of shot in the arm to get you going on your week. I think of them as productivity jump-starters. But you can think of them as posts designed to reduce your need for a third second cup of coffee. (subscribe in the side bar)

If you've come over from my devotion published today, you know today I'm talking about faith. And prayer. And not giving up. So this one is a shot in the arm for your prayer life.

Only I won't give the shot to you so much as Jesus will.

If you haven't already read the devo yet, be sure and do that so that 1) you'll understand why my neighbors think I'm erratic but I'm not, and 2) so your arm will be prepped for this next dose.

OK. I love me some parables. But I especially love it when Jesus spells things out plainly for us. He does that in Matthew 7:7-11.  Give me your arm, this won't hurt a bit ...

Ask, Seek, Knock

 

 “Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you.  For everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened."

 “Which of you, if your son asks for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a snake?  If you, then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him!"  (Matt 7:7-11, NIV)

If you do word studies on the verbs "ask," "seek," "knock" you'll discover that the tense they were written in would have you translate this as: "Ask, and keep on asking; seek, and keep on seeking; knock, and keep on knocking ... " In other words: PRAY ALWAYS AND DON'T GIVE UP.

Both this passage and the parable in the devotion communicate to us that sometimes in life you have to persist to see the outcome materialize. We don't always know why but apparently it is so. So make up your mind now to persist.

These passages also remind us that if a parent will give good things to the child they love, and even a cranky, corrupt judge will do the right thing when pressed to, of course your Heavenly Father will give you what you need when you come to Him in faith.

So stay at it while expecting results. That's the faith part.

{Desperation drives us to prayer. But it's faith that keeps us at it, expecting results.}

It's worth noting that the provision of the good gifts is probably a reference to the wisdom, blessing and guidance of God supplied in response to repeated requests. The teaching as a whole doesn't imply that we get everything we want, but that God gives the good that we need.

Case in point: I do not have a beach house in Malibu. Nor have I grown a single inch past my 5'2" frame.

If you want to read more on this passage in Matthew, I recommend Matthew Henry's excellent commentary on it. But if this shot in the arm is all you needed to close your eyes and seek God in prayer today - and again tomorrow - my work here is done.

What did you stop praying for?  What did you once seek, but give up on?

Tell me in a comment here, or on my Facebook post, and I'll join you in praying for it!

Pull the Trigger

I remember the day I realized I’d gotten in the habit of hesitating to pull the trigger.

 

 

Not on my spouse, or on the slow driver in front of me.  On my projects. 

 

I’d get whatever I was working on to a place of 60%, 80% or even 90% done, and then I’d stop working on it. I’d just walk away with the intention of finishing this later. And I was sure this was a smart move. Sometimes later came. But sometimes it didn’t.

 

Plans were made. Supplies were bought. But then the project wasn’t begun.  Or begun but not finished.

 

If I did manage to complete “production” on my work, I’d hesitate to pull the trigger on “shipping” it.  The “product” sat on my warehouse shelves instead of being sent to its intended customer.  Cards sat addressed and stamped but not mailed out. Writing pieces sat almost done, but not sent to editors.  

 

I realized this one day as I was online creating custom labels for some CDs I was making.  I spent an hour searching for a good label company to use, looking at the possible designs, choosing one, uploading my graphic to put on it, tweaking the colors on it, and then I final-proofed it and put it in my online shopping cart.  Then I quit. I didn’t place the order. Instead I saved it for later.

 

Twenty minutes later, while I was on to the next thing, I wondered, “Why didn’t I just finish that task while I was doing it?  It would’ve been so easy to just get it done.  Now I have to remember to go back and finish that.”

 

So why didn’t I pull the trigger? 

   Laziness?

      Procrastination?

           Perfectionism?

 

Those are always safe answers about why I'm hesitating. But as I thought it through, I realized there was something more to this trap I was in.

 

There had been a couple of times I gotten something almost done but waited to finish it. Then I got new information I didn’t have before, and I was glad I hadn’t yet pulled that trigger.  I found a better price elsewhere, or I learned that it won’t work like I thought it would. I read a bad review of it, or I dreamed up a different, better way to go about it.

 

The huge feeling of relief that I hadn’t yet pulled the trigger got associated with the act of stopping before finishing. Hesitating had brought me good results or saved me from bad ones.  So I started hesitating more often – just in case.
 

I’d reach almost done and start to wonder: Maybe I should sleep on this decision – think about it for a couple days. Is this the best possible deal? Am I going to regret this later? Have I spent too much time on this already today … maybe I should go work on something else for a while.

 

I lost sight of the reality that these incidents where waiting worked well were exceptions to the done-is-better-than-not-done rule.  Plus, I forgot how great “done” feels and how bad a gaggle of unfinished tasks feels.

 

Not pulling the trigger did bring me relief a couple of times, but it brought me frustration much of the rest of the time.  I had to work twice as hard to remember to go back and close the loop, finish the project, ship the product.  And I had to live with the consequences when I forgot.

Bottom Line:  
 

Better to pull the trigger while the metaphorical get-it-done gun is in your hand and aimed. If you wait until later you’ll have to find the gun, polish it up, reload it with motivation and re-aim it on your target. You don’t want or need to do all those extra steps.

 

Realizing that helped me a lot.  Maybe it will help someone else out there too. Today, I want you to pray, then pull the trigger on your projects. Unless of course, God tells you not to as you pray. Or, if you are aiming at your spouse or that slow driver in front of you.

 

 

Do you have a tendency to stop short of done?  ... Pull that trigger!

 

Why I'm Giddy (and Busy)

I apologize for the lack of a Monday Morning Motivation post this morning.  But a rather unique opportunity arose this morning. 

If I can get a course put together by 5:00 tomorrow, I can try to offer a special course at the university this spring.  One that allows me to take a group of students to Italy for ten days.

Rome, Sienna, Florence, Bologna ...

Yes, see, I knew you'd understand my dropping everything to make this happen.

I've always wanted to do this. So I will be back here once this brain child of a course has been birthed to paper and linked with the locations we'll visit. 

Sienna, Italy

Talk about short deadlines ... but I'm totally up for this challenge!

Why to-do's take forever to get done

My One Word for 2012 is CREATE. Here’s what I can tell you: A creative piece of work never feels entirely finished to its author. (In fact, I’ve heard of famous painters being banned from museums to keep them from continuing to add to their masterpieces.) So I tend to want to give myself as much time as possible to work on something.

And that’s a problem because: Work expands to fill the time available for its completion.

I talked about this proverb known as Parkinson’s Law the other week.

 

 

 

Parkinson’s Law means that if you give yourself a week to complete a two-hour task, the task will seem to increase in difficulty-to-get-done so as to fill that week. Even if it doesn't fill the week with more work, or endless tweaking, it will with the stress and tension of still needing to get it done. And remembering to get it done.

The remedy is to give yourself short deadlines. Shorter than you think is necessary, or comfortable.

I once read a response to Parkinson’s Law insinuating that if it were an accurate observation, you could assign a time limit of one minute to a task and it would become simple enough to complete within a minute. No. Parkinson’s Law a truism, not a law of physics.

It’s a truism because people generally give certain tasks more time than they really take to be completed. 

Why do we do that? 

4 Reasons Parkinson’s Law is in Effect

1) WE DREAD. It’s a task we’re dreading doing, so we keep putting it off. We convince ourselves it will be so dreadful and time-consuming that we can’t possibly deal with it right now. Surely tomorrow will be a better time to tackle this.

2) WE’RE TIME-CHALLENGED. It’s not that we don’t have enough time available to complete the task; rather we’re not good at determining how much time this task needs. Plus, we lallygag, daydream and get off track rather than focusing and getting it done – so it seems to take forever. (Personally, I can be a terrible judge of time.)

3) WE’RE PERFECTIONISTS. We assume that the longer we work on something the better it will turn out. And we want it to turn out as perfect as possible. So we give ourselves lots of time to work on it. And in the meantime, the task grows in complexity because we’re trying to do the best possible job at it. (Note: not everything needs to be "just right," many things just need to be done.)

4) WE STRESS. We live with stress. We don’t enjoy it. So we’re always looking to avoid more stress. We think that giving ourselves the buffer of some extra time to do the task will reduce our hurry and stress. Yet it often does not. Instead we stress all week over getting a two-hour task done, then we hurry to complete it last minute.

Any of this sound familiar? I am guilty of all four of those.

Parkinson's Remedy

By assigning ourselves (or our kids or employees) a short but doable amount of time to complete a task, we can gain back wasted time. Time spent dreading, postponing, daydreaming or trying to do something to an unreasonably or unnecessarily high standard. Then we can restore the perceived complexity of the task back to its true state—and reduce our stress.

 

So I'm working on giving myself short deadlines and getting to-dos done rather than tweaked twenty times or postponed. I'm completing more, faster. And that's upping my enthusiasm for my work. As Martha Stweart might say, "That's a good thing!"

“Never be lazy, but work hard and serve the Lord enthusiastically.^” ~ Romans 12:11