ONE MONTH TO LIVE: WEDNESDAY- "Routines"

Wednesday is here!! Today we continue our months theme of "One Month To Live" with a look at something near and dear to all of our hearts, out routine. A routine may be referred to as a course of normal, standardized actions or procedures that are followed regularly and often repetitiously. In other words, your routine is something that you do day in, day out. Kind of like a habit, but a habit that involves your entire life. I think you understand what I'm talking about. Having a routine is not all bad. It is good to have a young child on a routine, especially when sleeping. All of my kids went through a phase when they got out of their normal sleeping routine. Instead of sleeping at night, they decided that they liked the night life and would stay up all night and sleep most of the day. Besides sleeping in the right time of the day, other good routines might be brushing your teeth every morning, doing your homework right after school, positive things like that. The problem comes when your whole life becomes like one huge routine. A few years back, I saw a movie called "Groundhog Day". It starred Bill Murray as a dude that got caught in a kind of time warp where he lived the same day (Groundhog Day) over and over. The first few days, he did the same things that he did the days before. After a few days of doing the same thing over and over, he started to realize that he could do more. To live his life with a little more passion. Now I'm not going to tell you to live like he did in the movie but I do think a lesson can be learned here. Often times, we live our lives on "auto pilot". We, in effect, stop living our lives and start letting our lives live us. If you only had one month to live, would you continue just letting life drag you along?

Romans 12:1-2 gives us some words of encouragement on how we should live our lives.
Romans 12:1-2 (The Message)
Place Your Life Before God
1-2 So here's what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don't become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You'll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you.

Today, ask yourself these questions:
Are you placing your daily life as a daily offering to God?
Do you recognize the kind of life that God wants for you?
What do you need to change in your daily routine to address these issues?

Take some time to write down your answers to these questions.
Re-read the scripture above. Talk to God about it.
Talk to you tomorrow!

Dan aka P.H.