Transcription

Let me ask you this question, are you planning to fail? Now obviously you’d probably say, “No! Of course not”, but the old adage is, those who fail to plan, plan to fail. And at your work you have a project list of what you’re trying to accomplish. With your retirement you might have a project list of what you’re trying to accomplish. With your Saturday you might have a to do list of what you’re trying to accomplish but there’s a couple key areas in your life where it’s really easy to overlook and just assume they’re gonna drift into greatness – and nothing drifts in the greatness.

One is your relationship with your spouse and your family. What if you decided to plan to succeed there, deciding ahead of time what are my goals for this summer, what are my goals for this upcoming school year, what are my goals over maybe a long weekend. Not where you become a taskmaster with your kids saying we got to do a AB and C and clean the house and clean the cars, but rather some quality time, some quality experiences together. Maybe some service projects together where you decide ahead of time what’s our plan to succeed as a family.

Same is true with your marriage. Deciding we’re gonna get away for a weekend without the kids. We’re gonna have a regular date night. What happens is as we tend to nitpick at each other and fight but when we know we have a dedicated time every day, every week, every month or every year where we’re gonna get together and sit down and hash things out–you tend to save up some of those things for that moment to talk about, by the time you get to that dinner or that weekend away those problems you thought you had – weren’t that big a problem after all – they solve themselves.

When you plan to succeed in your relationships you are planning to make an investment in them and thus planning to succeed.

Let me give you one last one. What about your relationship with God? Most of us kind of just accidentally walk into that. You show up at church randomly; you’re gonna go on Easter, you’re gonna go on Christmas, maybe you’ll listen to something somebody sends you, or you might read a book somebody gives you. But what if you decided every day your gonna take just seven minutes – just start there – and you’re gonna read something out of the Bible and pray. What do you read?! Good question. Download the YouVersion Bible app. It’s been downloaded like 200 million times already and it’s in multiple languages and they have multiple reading plans for you there, even just a short verse of the day. If you just start doing that after a month, you read 30 or 31 verses from the Bible, that’s probably more than you did last month.

Make a decision that you’re going to plan on a little bit of time with God every day and what’s good happen is that time will begin to grow and grow to the point where it not only becomes a habit, but it becomes so worthwhile you’ll wonder why you hadn’t done it earlier.

So, are you planning to fail with your relationship with God, your kids or your spouse? You are – if you haven’t made a plan.