A Woman Of Significance: Overcoming Stress 预览

Be Captivated by the Wonder of Today 

Have you noticed that most women are always in a hurry? We hurry to potty train our children, and then hurry them off to preschool so we can have more leisure time. And yet, when they finally leave home, we long for the days when they used to put their little arms around our necks. Then, we wish we hadn’t hurried through those years.

Or, we hurry through the grocery store in the afternoon because we still have to make it to the drugstore, the gym, and the dry cleaner’s before 5:00 p.m. Yet, in our haste to check things off our to-do list, we miss the elderly man in the produce department who needs a word of encouragement, and we never even think to help the young mom in the checkout line with three young children and a cartload of groceries.

Hurry has become our addictive pattern in life.

The extravagant and undeniable truth is this: today is the very best day of your life! There is no fuller or grander gift than the undeserved endowment of the present. Today is the moment of miracles. The present holds the certainty of great richness and the assuredness of an existence that is too good to be true! Fall in love with being alive today!

As a significant woman, made in the image of God, I am able to choose how much splendor I will squeeze out of today. Will I slog through uncommon minutes and look dull-eyed at all that I have been given? Or, will I embrace the ordinary miracles that reveal their lovely heads in every waking moment?

If our focus is fixed on the remote possibilities of tomorrow, we will never be captivated by the wonder of now! We must keep in mind that stress and its accomplice, weariness, are unseen thieves that will embezzle the joy and peace right out of a wonderful day!

Women in every season of life must always remember that the choices they make now determine the joy and love they will experience in all of their tomorrows. The investment of wholehearted engagement in the present will assuredly bring a wealth of resources tomorrow. However, the focus must be on living well today.

Whenever I am fighting off the monster of stress, I have found it invigorating to keep the following declarations close at hand. I choose to lay aside my to-do list and take the time to remind myself—out loud—of the priorities that are most important for me:

“Today, I will make myself at home in the pleasure of this day and find the fingerprint of God in every moment. I will listen for His heartbeat and the song of life that comes only from heaven.”

“Today, I will connect myself to the present…and be captivated by the gift of today!”