MEMO TO THE DISORGANIZED:
If my private world is in order, it will be because I am convinced that the inner world of the spiritual must govern the outer world of activity.

I'm reading two books right now, "Visioneering," by Andy Stanley, and "Ordering Your Private World," by George Macdonald. Both I've read before. The first expounds on the book of Nehemiah, one of my favorites in the Bible. It rides the coattails of the Stealing the Good Life series rather neatly, helping me to put some structure again to my own visions and plans for my life. It should be a must read for anyone who felt a dramatic pull towards that series, seriously. They key phrase of the book: God's vision for your life is that picture of what could be and should be fueled by the conviction that it must be. Figure out what that is - and you've got it.

The second book, "Ordering Your Private World..." Have you read it? Judging by the fact that my notes and underlines are made using a bright pink gel pen, I'd say I first read it while working at Kettering Assembly of God in Dayton (because that's when Pastor Brad gave each of the staff one of those pens for highlighting books). I must have been 19 or 20 at the time then. As I get further into reading it, I'm sure I'll share some of my own thoughts about it, but until then, here are some of the underlines from back in the day. It should be interesting to see if these same parts stick out to me again. And yes, I know, you have no context for these excerpts...So sad for you. Go buy the book!

It is one thing for a person to make a mistake, or even to fail. We learn our best lessons of procedure and character under such conditions. But it is another thing to watch human beings disintegrate before our very eyes because there were no resources of interior support in the midst of the pressure.

To deal with drivenness, one must begin to ruthlessly appraise one's own motives and values just as Peter was forced to do in his periodic confrontations with Jesus. The person seeking relief from drivenness will find it wise to listen to mentors and critics who speak Christ's words to us today. He may have some humbling acts of renuciation, some disciplined gestures of surrender of things - things that are not necessarily bad, but that have been important for all the wrong reasons.

(on being called, not driven, and how stewardship plays a role): John's view of stewardship presents us with an important contemporary principle. For his crowds may be our careers, our assets, our natural and spiritual gifts, our health. Are these things owned, or merely managed in the name of the One who gave them. Driven people consider them owned, called people do not. When driven people lose them, it is a major crisis. When called people lose them, nothing has changed. The private world remains the same, perhaps even stronger.

About Jesus' command of time:
1. He clearly understood his mission. He had a key task to pursue, and he measured His use of time against that sense of mission.
2. He understood His own limits. He knew that He would need time to gather His reserves from time to time.
3. He set aside time for training the twelve.

And so it continued: strong people in my world controlled my time better than I did because I had not taken the initiative to command the time before they got to me.

Until we believe that prayer is indeed a real and highly significant activity, that it does in fact reach beyond space and time to the God who is actually there, we will never acquire the habits of worship and intercession. In order to gain these habits, we must make a conscious effort to overcome the part of us that thinks that praying is not a natural part of life.