Delores Liesner
Activating Faith in everyday life
What has #1 position in your 168 Hours a Week?
Shhhh. No one is supposed to know that even in church our Position sometimes goes to 
our heads. Rarely does one find a person at the top of the ladder who can toss off the burden of social image and still relate to those at the bottom, or on the first ‘rung’ of life’s ladder. It’s tough to mentor someone else from that precarious perch at the top, and sometimes that work-position or church-position becomes The Position in our lives.
More important than our position in our career, our church, or even in our home, is our position in Christ.
We each need to ask ourselves:
Where are you in relation to Christ?
Do you know him, or know about him?
Do you follow Him?
Focusing our thoughts on our position with Christ will illuminate things like the position where I have placed my time with the Lord, family, outreach and all the things we do in 168 hours we are given every week.
It is because (just like the oxygen mask in an airplane emergency) I must minister to myself in order to minister to others.
So
How can I minister to myself?
Especially when I feel overwhelmed by self-imposed lists of responsibilities and they become burdens.
A big thing we can do for ourselves is to examine our 168 hours a week. Write it out – everything. Then, far more important than asking what I am doing about each thing on my to do or should have done list, is to ask if the list itself has taken the position of priority in my time – and in my life. When I total up the hours for each activity what patterns do I see? What needs do I see? How can I position myself to be enabled to mentor others? What do the mentees seek?
When others seek a mentor, no one looks for a perfect person – or a perfectly-fallen person. I know I look for someone who has gone before me – been where I am going, or is where I am now – but has experienced victory, and continues to experience joy no matter life’s challenges.
I can minister to myself by evaluating what is on that chart. Once I complete it, I can then identify by highlighting or circling or totaling the time spent in each category. That will enable envisioning what position those activities have in my life, and I can easily determine which have been beneficial and which have been detrimental.
I once played a silly game at a shower. One volunteer sat under a blanket and other attendees circiled around the covered woman calling out for her to toss out what she would not need for an extremely hot and oppressively humid day. Whatever she tossed out from under the blanket made for shrieks of hilarity because, of course, she was surrounded by the answer – the blanket. Something beautiful that had become an encumbrance.
Similarly, in order to minister to others, I need to remove whatever is that weight – that blanket in my life that amplifies my burden.
What can I throw off to better serve my husband (piles of papers). What can I throw off to better serve others (too much time on social media), what can I throw off to minister to myself? (whatever holds me back from life and health).
A simple tool to identify your suffocating blanket —a 168 hour worksheet – can be found by Rhonda of Eyeinspire. Link below
http://eyeinspire.com/being-mindful-of-time-168-hours-worksheets/
I’d love to hear about what you found in your 168 hours. What were the top 5 or top 3 time-used categories? What is your ‘blanket’? and What can you toss off to better serve others?
Be the Miracle! – with journaling pages
Delores Liesner: Author
American Christian Fiction Writers Association
Delores Liesner 