Looking Back

In my “spare” time (which I have plenty of these days), I have been going through my old calendars and journals looking back at what all I was involved with or accomplished, pretty much all the way back to my college days (back before electricity). One thing I have discovered is that I spent an enormous amount of time and energy the last 30 years on people and/or projects that never came to fruition. This includes wasted hours and meetings with what appeared to be promising sales contacts that I never sold anything to during my “business” days. It also includes people who were in the churches I served who were high maintenance consumers, that is they constantly needed attention and stroking, but they never contributed anything to the church (and I don't mean financially). It also includes people I prayed for and taught, hoping they’d come to know Jesus, who never crossed over the line of faith or church membership, which, by the way, I recognize as two distinct things.

Obviously your calendar should reflect your priorities, both looking ahead and looking back. As your most precious commodity, time should be spent wisely and with greatest effect. If it has been, you should be able to look back and feel proud of how you allocated your days. You should feel like your time was well spent. Unfortunately, when I look back I find far too many instances where my time and effort was misspent. Too many meetings proved barren. There were strategy and visioning sessions that consumed days and even weeks which ultimately did not pan out, or worse, which backfired. Meetings for meals or visits in people's homes which seemed to accomplish nothing. What was I thinking?

The problem, of course, is that when you are in the midst of these, it is difficult, if not impossible, to know which ones will prove fruitful. If you knew, then you would spend your time and energy there. Surely we wouldn't knowingly waste our resources, would we?

Obviously no one bats .1000. We must accept the fact that plenty of our time and energy may lead to nothing. Rather than beating yourself up about this, concentrate instead on being more discerning – learn what to put on the back-burner, and what needs to go right there on front. I believe that many of the decisions we make about which people and activities will receive the lion’s share of our attention are often made without really thinking them through. We must learn the power of that simple word “no.” We must not worry so much about disappointing others. Otherwise you’ll end up like one of those plate-spinners that used to be on the Ed Sullivan show (familiar to my older readers) and you’ll be going 100 miles per hour and getting nowhere. Look back and learn; I did.