What I Learned from My Accidental Day Off

The other day I had a day off but it wasn’t a planned  day off, I’m referring to it as an accidental day off.  The thing is I really don’t take days off, I take vacations where I walk away from all my work, but I normally work every day of the week.  On my days off from my Job that pays the bills I normally work between 4 to 5 hours on church things.  But on this day I had planned on going to meetings, but do to an unforeseen 5 hours of talking to tech support I decided to skip the meeting and use the day to catch up on other work.  Autumn’s aunt was wanting to come over and see us so Autumn had told her this day would work.  We had to do some running around town in the morning nothing that big just had pick some odd and ends.  Once we got back I figured I would get some work done then when Autumn’s aunt got here I would take a break finish up later in the evening.  We got back home I sat on the couch and somehow completely forgot about all the work I wanted to do.  Autumn informed me her aunt was going to be later then excepted.  I remembered we had some movies on the DVR we wanted watch. Truth be told they have been there for months maybe some longer than a year.  I said let’s see what’s on the DVR, we started watching “The Intern,” which was a great movie.

At some point about half way through the movie a thought entered my mind, “so this is what it feels like to have a day off.”  Along with this piece of scripture, “On the seventh day, having finished his task, God rested from all his work.  And God blessed the seventh day and declared it holy, because it was the day when he rested from his work of creation.”(Gen 2:2-3)  As I had this thought accord to me I thought maybe God is trying to tell me something, you can ask Autumn I don’t forget about work and I don’t just relax all that easy when I have a list of things I want to get done.  I’m a bit more high strong then I should be.  I complained for almost two days about being on the phone for over five hours with tech support and how much I should have gotten done.  But I had forgotten how important a day of rest is for us.  God even commanded Israel that they are to take a day of rest.  Now Moses called a meeting of all the people and told them, “You must obey these instructions from the Lord. Each week, work for six days only. The seventh day is a day of total rest, a holy day that belongs to the Lord. Anyone who works on that day will die. Do not even light fires in your homes on that day.”(Ex 35:1-3)  As I began to realize I was no longer allowing myself to truly rest, I would come to a point of exhaustion push myself to go a little further, then I would collapse on the couch and just zone out.  I would come back from vacations feel rested for about a week and then be exhausted again.

I told Autumn I now realize that I need to take a day of rest, a day where I relax, a day where I do things with family or around the house that need to be done.  On this day I do not work on sermons, try to figure out what my next series is.  I am allowed to write my blog, record my YouTube show only because these are things that I can do and relax while doing them although I am going to do my best to have all my blogging done by day off.  I can work around on projects such as our yard and so on.  But I am going to train myself to relax and take a real day off a full day.  I’m going to learn to relax more and not worry about the work that is not yet done, let us not forget worrying is also a sin.  So I challenge you to Take a day off every six days and reenergize your body and your soul.  It is important to remember to make time for God on your day off as well.    

Goals Part Two: Finances

As we talked about in Goals part one there were four sections in my life I was working on, we already talked about fitness goals.  Today I want talk financial goals, financial goals are important for a number of reasons.  Biblically speaking the bible tells us we cannot have two masters, we either serve God or we serve Money. Christ tells us “No one can serve two masters. For you will hate one and love the other, or be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.

 (Mt 6:24) If we are living in a great deal of debt it is the debt that begins to control our lives.  We have become extremely dependent on Credit Cards.  The average American carries about 15,622 dollars according to Nerdwallet.com.

I feel it is important to discuss how Autumn and I have come up with goals for our finances.  We decided that we do not want to be controlled by debt.  We have a car loan and the house mortgage, we have a credit card and normally pay it off every month.  Notice I said normally this is what we are working on in finances.  We have realized that we make a budget every month and with every intention to follow it, but we get busy and forget to sit down write down we are buying.  What happens is we overspend on groceries, or entertainment or whatever.  We have come up with a plan we have put partially in place. The plan consists of rules to help guide us so we don’t have to dip into our savings to pay off the credit card at the end of month. 

Rule number one:

 we have to tell each other what we are buying, this isn’t asking permission, it is more of making sure we know what has been spent.  But we do ask each other, here is an example.  The other day I was on Amazon and saw a movie we both really enjoyed, we do not normally buy movies anymore because we found we never watch them enough for it to make sense.  I asked Autumn and she said do you really think we are going to watch it that much.  I stopped and thought about that question for a few days and decided not to buy it.

Rule number two:

We are going to start working on the budget together each week to see where we are at and how our spending is going.  What this does is makes us think more about where the money is going and do we really want to spend our entertainment money on that or maybe we want to save it for another event. 

Rule number three:

Slowey get rid of recurring payment on things we really don’t use that often.  The biggest item on that list is our cable bill, we have been very slowly getting rid of it, we need the internet but we really do not watch that much T.V. we have found other places that would allow us to watch football live and news stations that would be cheaper.  The big hold up on this is the cable company I call them about every three months get more cable taken off, but they are not wanting to give us a good deal on just high speed internet and phone.  It is a process that I feel in the end I will win.

 The goal for our finances is to become good stewards of our money, so we can give more to charity and people in need.  The other part of that is so we can save money for projects around the house and retirement.  We are use a budgeting tool I found through Dave Ramsey’s site called EveryDollar.com.  We are working to get complete control of our money so it never controls us.  

Taking Control Of Your Day

As I have been looking at my goals one thing I have begun to understand is in order to achieve any of my Goals is I must begin to control my days better.  Can we really have complete control of our days?  I don’t believe that is ever going to happen, just the other day I ended up on the phone with tech-support for 5 hours, side note never call Microsoft tech support they won’t fix your problem.  That is a prime example of how I did not have control of my day, and there was nothing I could do about it.  What if instead of trying to control our whole day we took control of different parts of our day?

I have realized that I have lost all control of my mornings, I get up and nothing gets done, for almost two hours because I sit and watch the news and drink coffee then frantically get ready for work and rush breakfast.  As I analyzed my day it made sense to begin to grab control of this part of my day, what a great part of my day to get work done.  I have done some things to help with this, I have started getting as much done before bed to help me out.  I pack my gym bag and lay out my clothes for the next morning.  With my wanting to fit back into my suit in two months I have decided that I should go ahead and start the day by doing an Insanity Max workout, this may be replaced with something else such as reading or studying depending on goals at the time.  At one time in my life I had great control over my mornings and have always felt that during that time I was more productive.  The other part the morning is going to be spent in time of reading and getting things ready for my Sunday message and blogs and so on. 

The evenings can be another part of our life we lose control of with realizing it is easy to begin to get home and sit down and say I exhausted.  Next thing you know you have spent the whole evening watching Netflix, HGTV, Hulu you get the point.  I have been realizing how many evening I have spent doing just that.  One of the best things I have started doing is going to the YMCA directly from work I get a workout in that is already mapped out for me and even on the nights I don’t feel like it I force myself to do it.  This works better than me trying to come home and workout at the house.  I have started putting down on paper what it is that I want to get done that night.  I have been finding that this works great I also let Autumn know and then she can encourage me to get things done.

I am still struggling but I am working hard on this, maybe your like I was and are saying I just don’t have the time to do all the things I want do.  If so I would encourage you to begin to take control of your life. Here are some ideas to help you get started.

·         Make a list of things you want to do, goals, hobbies, house work etc

·         Start writing down what you’re doing during your free time, be honest about how long it is.

·         Study the list of things you do and how long they take, this key for figuring out where you lose your time

·         Decide what can go and begin to take control of your time

I understand that things are going to happen out of our control that are going to take away our control and that is okay.  Things happen but we need to begin to realize that our time can be better controlled then we think.  The days that I do control my time are the days I enjoy best.

Disciplined Life: Part One

I have decided it is time for me start blogging again, I actually have decided it time for me to start doing a lot of things.  I realized some days ago I had become somewhat lazy, got into a funk, I made all kinds of reasons for it, I was sick, I'm busy with other things, I deserve to be a little lazy.  Then I realized a few things, one, all the reasons I listed were really excuses for not doing what I knew I needed to be doing to move forward in my relationship with God, relationship with others, and moving forward.  The next few blogs are going to be about the changes that Autumn and I have decided we need to start making in our lives.  I decided to take you on the journey with me and I hope that along the way my experience is going to help you. 

I have for some time believed that God desires for those of us who follow Him and have a relationship with Him, to live a disciplined life.  Some may try to say that there isn't any scripture to back this thought, I would say your correct in that.  No place does it say "man shall live a disciplined life."  Although as we go through and read and study scripture it seems to indicate that we are to be disciplined in how we live.  Let's just take proverbs for example it seems that Solomon is indicating that laziness leads one to living a godless life.  The seven deadly sins would indicate that one needs be disciplined in how they live. 

With this thought in mind I realized that I need to become disciplined in my life, I came up with four things to work on in the next two months, made four goals and shared them with Autumn, I am in the process of writing them out and making a plan for each of them in the next few weeks I will share them with you explain why I feel each of these areas are important for each of us to be disciplined in and through my weekly Vlog I'll keep you up to date on how I am doing in each area.  I came up with four areas that I feel I need to constantly be working on and creating goals in these areas of my life. These four are, 1) Physical Health, 2) Spiritual Health, 3) Financial Health, 4) Job Health. 

This week let us talk about physical health, I know it is not said anywhere in the bible that we are to make sure that we stay in tip top shape.  But if we are really honest with ourselves we can find enough scripture that all but instructs us not to live unhealthy lifestyles.  But let us also realize that being unhealthy brings a great deal of complications in ones life.  Autumn and I have decided it is time that we both get in better shape and eat healthier.  There are many reasons for this for one on both Autumn's side the family has diabetes and other health issues which is do to both genes and weight issues.  I have realized that I have in the last year put on some weight and can no longer fit in my suit and many shirts comfortably.   The other major reason with us hoping that for Autumn to become pregnant in the next year, we would love to see our child grow up eating healthy and learning from our example on living a healthy life.   

We have both outlined a plan on becoming what we both realized was that in order to do so we had to gain control of our days, we realized that we had been spending too much time allowing our days to control us.  I will go into further details on that in my next blog.  upon realizing that we came up with a plan, for the next two months we decided to put a great deal of effort into becoming in shape.  I am going to outline my plan for you and here and I hope that this is going to help you as well I will post my updates on what I lose on my vlog and let you know when I can comfortably fit into my suit again.  

Goal: Fit Into Suit 

1. Eat Healthy 

2. No processed sugar (except for on Sunday Cheat Day) 

3. On Sunday Cheat Day I will only eat one dessert 

4. Workout 

5. I will go through Insanity Max in the mornings 

6. I will go to the YMCA after work 

7. Work toward running  6 miles in under 60 minute 

8. Stay focused