Your mission in life is who you are and who you're meant to be, the summation of your values, priorities, and roles. Writing it out would be a good exercise that would probably take days or weeks as the ideas became clearer. One method to get the process going is to imagine what you'd want people to say at your funeral. This is analogous to the judgment seat of Christ.
Your present priorities are revealed by how you spend your time, not by what you say or what you believe. Keeping a time log for a week can be startling, especially when compared to the imaginary funeral orations.
Thinking about mission and priorities helps to discern a vision of what God is willing to do through you. Nehemiah's goal was something that God had put in his heart (Neh. 2:12). Heb. 11:13 tells of those who had faith and saw things (a visual term) and embraced them before they actually received them. Their lives were dominated by a vision.
When you can visualize the end, it becomes possible to identify the necessary steps to get there.
"Your present priorities are revealed by how you spend your time, not by what you say or what you believe."
ReplyDeleteI really appreciate this statement. It's so easy to say what we want to do or to think about what we want to do, but actually doing it is a different matter.
Also, I've noticed that keeping a time log is actually a good preventative measure against wasting time. You're less likely to spend time on Q4 activities when you think to yourself, "Do I really want to have to write this down in my time log?"