Crisis Averted 

The fast-paced environments we live in somehow make everything feel urgent. Bombarded by a million things clamoring for our attention, we become flustered and anxious. We panic and within seconds are in full-blown crisis mode. And, in crisis mode, we falsely imagine that what is urgent must also be important.

Urgent ≠ Important.

However, we ought to develop a process for managing the urgent things so that we have time and energy for the truly important things. This brings us to our fourth and final simplification question:

“What deserves my attention?”

Unfortunately, life doesn’t happen in clearly differentiated buckets and at a casual pace. 

It’s messy and often quite frantic!

As such, it’s imperative that we step back and assess our lives. The goal being to determine what the really important things are. They may be things like spending time with family, completing that really big project at work, or carving out some time for personal soul care. Whatever they are, identifying them is key because, at the end of the day, those things are what deserve our attention.

Jesus offers us a great example of this. 

In John 4, we find Jesus leaving the Judean countryside on a road trip back to Galilee. Interestingly, the text tells us that Jesus “had to go through Samaria.” Now, in those days, Jewish travelers avoided Samaria like the plague. The Jewish and Samaritan people had a long history of animosity and contempt for each other.

But Jesus heads right into the thick of it.

Why?

Because His whole mission was to proclaim the Kingdom of God. And everyone is welcome in the Kingdom of God—including those we may perceive as enemies. That’s what’s important to Jesus! Even the dreaded Samaritans deserved His attention. So, he gave it to them. He proclaimed the Kingdom of God to them. And we are told in the text that, “because of his words many more became believers.”

We too must determine what’s important and deserves our attention. Then we need to give our attention to those things. Not at the expense of other things, but everything in its proper place. This will allow us to create time and space in our daily lives to do the good (important) work God created for us to do!

White Space Moment

Spend some time thinking about the following questions:   

• What feels urgent in my life?   
• What things do I think are important?   
• Of all those things, what deserves my attention?   
• What steps can I take to give those important things my attention?