30 Days to Live: Living with an Eternal Perspective (2 of 5)

Lord, make me to know my end, and what is the extent of my days, let me know how transient I am.  Behold, You have made my days as handsbreadths, and my lifetime as nothing in Your sight, surely every man at his best is a mere breath.  Psalm 39:4-5

Why is it that we live in the “when” and have good intentions instead of living in the now with good actions? 

 

Because we’ve confused the urgent for the important. 

 

For example, you get home from work, heat up some Chef Boyardee for the family, and rush out the door because of little league.  We stress out because our premium channel cable bill is due the day before payday.  We get all bent out of shape because we come home to find that your kids have wrecked the living room, leaving it in worse shape than a steel cage triple threat death match.  All of these things are urgent. 

 

But are they really important?

 

What happens when we confuse the urgent for the important?  It snowballs on us—we get grumpy when we’re late, we get stressed when a bill is late, and we blow up at the kids.  We lose perspective.  We forget the difference between the urgent and what’s truly important.  Don’t get me wrong, a lot of the urgent stuff still needs to get done—we need to pay our bills, keep appointments, etc.  But some of the urgent, when we step back, isn’t so urgent.  And when the urgent becomes the focus of life, the important soon becomes unimportant, unnoticed, and undone.  Our lives get out-of-whack, and we wonder how and why everything unraveled.

 

We need to turn our whens into nows, our intentions into actions, and our whole hearts toward Jesus.  But it’ll never happen until we live with the right perspective—the eternal perspective.  It helps us to differentiate between the urgent and truly important.