Priorities

This was written during Holy Week, and I just didn't get around to posting it until now.  Perhaps you will still find some meaning in it.

Last Sunday was Palm Sunday.  This is the start of what is often referred to as Holy Week.  This Thursday will be Maundy Thursday.  Then comes Good Friday.  And of course, next Sunday is Easter Sunday.

In one sense, of course, every week should be Holy Week.  We should always try to serve God and be faithful to God and show our love to God.  And, of course, the best way we can show our love to God is to show our love to others. 

But all of us are human.  And that means that we all tend to lose our focus at times.  We know we should serve God and be faithful to God, and we are in our way, but we let other things distract us.  We let other things become more important than they should be.  We know God should be our top priority, but we think this other thing needs to be done right now.  God will always be there.  We’ll get around to God when we have more time.

God will always be there, of course.  But God does not deserve to be pushed aside for other things.  God should be our top priority at all times, not because God is vain or arrogant or anything but because God deserves that.  God deserves our full attention and love and worship at all times.

And so it’s good to have a week we refer to as Holy Week.  It’s a chance for us to refocus our lives.  It’s a chance for us to get our priorities straight.  It’s a chance for us to get the distractions out of the way.  It’s a chance for us to push aside all the things that distract us, and get back to making God our top priority.

God has a plan for your life.  God always has had a plan for your life.  I suspect there are times you’ve known that, when you’ve felt like you were exactly where God wanted you to be and were doing exactly what God wanted you to do.  But I suspect there have been other times when you’ve wondered.  There have been times when you wondered if you really were following God’s plan for your life. 

And, as you get older, maybe you wonder if you’ve completed God’s plan for your life.  At your age, at your stage of life, can God still have a plan for you?  Are there still things you can do to serve God?

The answer is yes.  God still does have a plan for you.  There are still things you can do to serve God.  They may not be the same things they used to be.  They may seem like very small things.  But you can still serve God in some way, probably in a variety of ways.  As long as we’re on earth, God has reasons for us to be here.  It’s up to us to find those reasons.

Sometimes that’s not easy.  Here’s what I suggest you do.  First, of course, pray.  Ask God to show you what the plan is for your life right now.  Ask God to show you what you can do to serve God.  But second, until you get an answer, keep doing the best you can.  Keep doing the best you can to serve God.  Do the things you do.  Do a little extra if you can.  Think about how you can serve God by doing those things.  Do that until you get an answer, because eventually you will.  And in fact, it may be through the doing of those things that the answer becomes known to you.

So during this Holy Week, make God your top priority.  And ask God what the plan is for your life.  If we do that honestly and faithfully, God will bless us.  And this might just be the most meaningful Holy Week we’ve ever had.