All In A Days Grace

  There’s something beautiful about a sailboat going by on the horizon. From a distance there’s this fluid motion of movement. We can imagine the wind pushing against the sail and gliding the ship across the waves. I once had the opportunity to help sail a boat. My family and I were in St. Augustine and took a guided sail boat ride. The ride began by the large sailboat moving out into the open waters away from the docked shore. When we were out in the open waters the captain asked if anyone wanted to help “raise the sails”. I immediately volunteer, excited to be part of our sailing adventure. There were two of us needed to raise the sails and on the captain’s command, we began to do just that. My first tug seemed to do nothing. I put more strength behind my second tug and leaned my body back to give more weight to my efforts. This was not easy. As I started to get a rhythm of pull, I could feel the sting in my arms and shoulders. It felt as if I had been pulling on that rop...

  Are your prayers dangerous or safe? Maybe you’ve never even considered that your prayers could be either of those things. When we sit at the feet of God and offer up our prayers, are we focused on the quantity or quality? We constantly hear how important prayer is. We should do it every day . We should consistently pursue prayer for everything. All of that is true; but there’s more. Did you ever have someone come to you in order to ask something from you, but they never really asked at all? What they did was kind of dance around what they wanted to ask. For whatever reason, they didn’t want to come right out and ask you. They were hoping along the way that you would “interpret” their need and jump in with an offer, so they didn’t have to actually make the ask. Sometimes we call this “passive-aggressive” behavior; the idea of hinting at something instead of coming out and saying what we actually want to say. Our culture as a whole does this chronically. It seems we’re ...

  We spend 1/3 of our life sleeping. That’s 1/3 of our life in an unconscious state. When we think about that we might get an overall feeling that we’ve wasted allot of time, but the reality is, that we need that time in order to live. A third of our life is spent allowing our bodies to rejuvenate and heal. During that time of rest there is restoration, rejuvenation and revitalization. Why? So that we can LIVE our lives to the fullest capacity. So that we can shine. We plug in our phones, we charge our batteries and we rest our bodies so that all can function to the best of their ability. What about the other two thirds of time in our lives? What do we do with that part of our life? Are we living that part unconsciously too? Most people have the same reaction when they hear how much we sleep in our lifetime; “All that time wasted asleep!” The thing we really have to ask ourselves though is “are we wasting our time awake ?”  When we rise each day where do we invest t...