What Matters Most
What matters most to you?
What matters most to you does matter. It matters because your choices about priorities affect you and those you love. It matters because your priorities determine the way you invest your time, money, and energies. It matters because the way you invest your time, money, and energies will determine your character, the person you will become. It matters because your character is the most important thing you have going for you.
How do you know what matters most to you? As mentioned before, Investing In The Things That Matter Most is the subtitle of my book Heaven’s Currency. In the book I suggest that we can answer the question about what matters most to us by looking at how we invest our time, money, and energies. Our time, money, and energies are normally invested in the things and people we really value.
If you spend all your non-working hours watching TV, it says you must really love TV. It is not that watching TV, per se, is sinful but what are you not doing that you could be doing with all that time you are glued to the TV? We could talk about lots of other ways we use our time, as well as how we use our energies and money to express what is number one on our priority list. Jesus made an observation about how our actions follow what we love most in Matthew 6: 21, “Where your treasure is, there is your heart also.”
What happens when the wrong things matter most?
There are lots of things to occupy our attention these days. Many of us are understandably concerned about the myriad of problems our nation is facing. We want our children and grandchildren to be able to attend school and avoid the viruses that seem to be everywhere. Some of these kinds of things we can do something about and some we cannot. We need to be able to separate what we can do from what we cannot and do what we can.
The serious issues in our lives arise when we substitute the good or not so good things for the best. We are asking for trouble when we neglect the best for second or third best, when the wrong things matter most.
For example, you or someone you know may be working extraordinary hours to provide a really good lifestyle for their family. It’s good to provide for your family but is there a point of diminishing returns? How much is enough? How will such actions affect one’s personal health? What will all this time away do to the marriage and relationships with the children? This is a classic example of how the love for money and the things it can provide come to matter more than family relationships.
Keeping a good balance in life requires that we understand what matters most and not allow our greed, ambition, or pride to rearrange the priority order that God says is in our long term best interest. Balance is an important idea to keep in mind in all aspect of our life. We need to do everything we can to keep our health, attitude, emotions, spiritual life, schedules, and relationships in balance. This life-balance begins with our decision to be responsible for these areas of our life. I wrote a blog a while back on balance that you will find helpful as you consider how you will make the things that matter most matter most to you. https://www.cosdavis.com/life-lessons-living-a-balanced-life
Marriage and parenting are certainly two things I believe should matter most to us. If you need more balance in those areas, you can find help in my books, Marriage Is What You Make It https://www.cosdavis.com/marriage-is-what-you-make-it
and Parenting With a Purpose https://www.cosdavis.com/parenting-with-a-purpose
Recently I ran across this quote by Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw that focuses on one of the things that maters most to me, “A happy family is but an earlier heaven.” http://brainyquotes.com What things matter most to you? 