• Our career to keep up.
• Our spouse to keep happy.
• Our kids to raise.
• Our relationship with God to grow.
• Our family to maintain.
• Our education to continue.

And on and on the list can continue.  How do we continue to go through life and keep our head above the water?  What puts things in perspective for us to help us choose between what is good and what is best?

So my question is, what do you do to determine what you will and won’t do?

Sometimes we get so caught up trying to find balance that we forget that God calls us to fall completely upon His power. Balance often comes from slowing down, putting priorities in place, and living with margin. Come found out this weekend at COASTAL COMMUNITY CHURCH how we can find balance in a life that so many times expects us to live in the extreme.

I know what your thinking, “One thing?  Are you crazy?  My life will never be any different if I only choose one thing.”  I know that is what you think but I believe that if we change one thing a year, over ten year we have changed ten things in our lives for the better that stuck.  If we only have to focus on being successful at ONE THING it is so much easier to walk out that plan than working on twenty plans.

I think that this year we need to make a choice to change ONE THING in our lives and work that ONE THING the entire year and see how much success we have over a period of time rather than trying to fix everything at once.

Without friction in our lives it is hard to get the ruff edges off.  I worked construction all growing up and when you want to deliver the final product to the customer, you want it to be smooth with no ruff edges. You don’t want them to slide their hand on a railing and get a splinter, that would be a very bad thing.  No you want everything to be perfect.  So what you do is you get the wood into place and then you sand it like crazy, back and forth, back and forth until it is smooth and ready to be used for what it was intended.  God is doing the same thing in our lives so many times.  He is taking out the sand paper of life(trials) and going back and forth, back and forth to smooth out the ruff areas of our lives so we can be used for his glory and purpose.  The problem is that most of us don’t like the trials.  So instead of enduring the pain, we run from the pain and wonder why we are not doing something great in our lives.  We have got to go through the trials to become the man or woman that God wants us to become.

I want to encourage you today to look for the hope in the trial, not the trial itself.  In the end you will come out looking more and more like your intended purpose.

If you want to check out the second week of the series, you can watch it here.

I cannot wait for this weekend.  I believe that God truly wants to do some big healing in peoples lives and give them a hope that is sustainable.