Schedules

I had the opportunity to hear Bill Hybels speak at Gateway Church on Monday night. Hybels tends to be very practical, very down to earth in his speaking and writing. Monday night, as he spoke, my thought was that it was good; not earth-shaking, life-changing, memory-making; but worth the effort to hear.
When I left the conference, I couldn't stop thinking about what he said. I think it was life-changing. He spoke about making schedules. The content could be summed up in one sentence, "When you make out your schedule, don't think about what you need to get done, think about what you want to be".
Think about what you want to be, consider what you need to do to become that, and make your schedule around that. "Plugging one item into a schedule can change your life."

Hybels had a lot of examples to illustrate. He recounted that as a young man, when his daughter, Shawna, was three years old, he was very busy with the church he had started, with a lot of meetings in the evenings. One night, after supper, as he told his wife and daughter good-bye, Shawna sweetly and innocently said, "Daddy, are you going to be gone again tonight?" That little statement broke his heart. He realized that one thing he wanted to be was a great daddy to Shawna. As he asked God what he needed to do to be a great daddy, God said, "Four nights a week." Bill wrote into his schedule "home" four nights every week, to be at home, focused on his family, attentive to his wife and daughter so that he could be the daddy, and the husband that he wanted to be.

Application: I want to be healthy. To be healthy, I need to exercise at least three times a week. So, I need to put exercise into my schedule three times every week. As long as I leave exercise as something I need to do, but don't put it in my schedule, the odds are not good that I will actually do it.

Much more important to me than that is that I want to be a radical, extreme, crazed follower and lover of Jesus, hearing Him speak and responding to everything He says.

I am praying about what I need to plug into my schedule to become that.

What do you want to be?
What steps do you need to take to become that?