Motivation

I've been thinking a lot about commitment, goals, and the weight of my words and actions. (this is a new years post, just so you know. =P )

Lately, I've been taking advantage of the fact that I'm really really good at doing things last minute.

I don't say that to brag. In fact it's a terrible weakness of mine.

I can memorize my speech the night before the tournament and still do well.
I can study new vocab right before taking the test and remember it.
I have fabulous short-term memory.
Basically, I can learn quickly. I can also rattle of said learned information and sound like I know what I'm talking about.

In the past couple years, though, I haven't really internalized much of what I've learned. That's not to say that I haven't learned anything, but that a lot of my life has been lived on the surface.

I could go into a lot more here, and I will in a later post. But lately I've been thinking about everything I say as if I was binding myself into a legal contract.

A couple weeks ago, I was challenged by the speaker in awana who was talking about how she made the commitment when she was 12 years old to read her Bible every day for at least 5 minutes a day.

At first I thought this kind of weird. Then I thought again. And I found it a rather brilliant idea.

So I wrote up a little piece of paper stating my commitment, signed it, put it in an envelope, and stuck it in my Bible.

I have now committed to reading my Bible at least 5 minutes every single day for the rest of my life.

One person I talked to was slightly taken aback at first.

"Isn't that kind of a lofty goal?"

I mean, you know, we all make New Years' resolutions, and almost half of them are unreachable ideals that we set to make ourselves feel better, or at least so that at the end of the year we can say "well, I tried."

But if you think about it, that's such a tiny little commitment. 5 minutes a day. Out of how many minutes in our crazy days?

And what else does Christ ask of us but for the rest of my life? I say my life is committed to Christ, but what does that mean?

Well, for me, it means that every day for the rest of my life, I am going to spend time reading His word.

It's kind of big, but if you think about it, it's really rather small. Yet this is what God asks of us.

Since then, it's been crazy how impactful the idea of my signature on that piece of paper is.

That means if I miss one single day, I've broken my commitment: one I made to Christ. That's pretty huge, you know.

I don't have many goals for the coming new year. (2011. Isn't that kind of scary?) But one of my goals this year is to reach all my goals. How about that?

So often we make them just to make us feel better, to sort of put us in an ambitious mindset in hopes of reaching the perfect ideal. As if writing it down is going to magically make it happen.

Since I've been so good at doing things last minute, the concept of working for something is sort of hard to grasp sometimes. But that really hit home to me when I went to Nats last year. [see my Nationals tag for more about that] Learning what it means to work hard for a goal and to reach it.

One of my friends pointed out that I'm really goal oriented. I never really thought of myself as particularly this way, but the more I think about it, the more it's true. When I set my mind to something, I really do do it. The fact is that I haven't been setting my mind to very much...just sort of flitting around and only halfway setting my mind to things.

So here's to the New Year: setting my mind on knowing Christ - and actually reaching my goals. My goal is to be committed. To my friends, my family, my schoolwork, and my Savior. What are your goals?