How Can You Maximize Your Life?
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It’s often been said that life is a great teacher, but perhaps the greater truth is that life has the potential to be a great teacher. Life is composed of both good and bad days, wonderful and terrible seasons, Potentially we can learn from everything from everyday, every experience. However, often we fail to really gain all that is potentially ours.
We sometimes speak of how we suppose we didn’t get a particular lesson on the first go-round so we have found ourselves going around again.
Those of us who are Christians often offer that example referring to the children of Israel who wandered around in the wilderness for forty years because of their unbelief. Around and around the same mountain they went. But in reality, the Israelites who didn’t believe, died in the wilderness and never entered the Promised Land. It was the new generation who were allowed to enter.
We would all agree that we don’t want to be the generation who never learned, or who learned too late to make a difference.
So how do we maximize our lives? How do we learn? Here are a few ways that I am learning and have learned – and I hope to keep learning because I want to be all I can be. I want to maximize my life for the glory of God.
On a Personal Note
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My life has been somewhat unpredictable in the last few days.
Last weekend, my husband almost died after a surgical procedure on his heart. Thankfully, he is doing well now. More about that later.
Also last week, my oldest son was hospitalized with a kidney stone which he gladly passed the next day, and my daughter-in-law, who is in the last days of her first pregnancy and has had some exciting moments. (Yes, I am going to be a grandmother. I realize that I am too young 
which is what happens when you marry at 18. Feel free to send me youthful sounding grandmother names.)
This weekend, I’ve been dogsitting my daughter’s Cavalier King Charles Spaniel, Maverick, of whom my Yorkshire Terrier, Gabriel, is terrified. Maverick, however, desperately longs to play with Gabby. The ongoing scenarios have been quite humorous to say the least.
I just spent an hour talking to my almost 18 year-old son about what 15 year-old girls are like. And last, but never least, my soon to be 15-year-old son and I had a nice discussion about 4-wheeler engines. I’m not sure which of those conversations I understood better but the 4-wheeler one was definitely easier.
I am also finishing my Master’s in Professional Counseling and so I have added intern hours to my normal (what is that anyway?) life schedule.
Lessons Learned from a Basket of Socks
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Some days I just feel braver than others. Today is one of those days for me. I woke up. Had my coffee. Read my emails. Checked my Facebook. Drank a second cup of coffee. And then I knew I could do it.
So I marched right into the laundry room and picked up the two large baskets full of unmatched socks and paraded into the room where my husband was so he could lend moral support to me. Of course, literal physical help would have been better but he hurt his back yesterday so I figured I’d just take what I could get at the moment, which was moral support.
I dumped out basket number one and began. Dark socks. White socks. Then short socks. Long socks. Then Eddie’s socks. My socks. Elliott’s socks. Nathan’s socks. Shoot, I even found a pair of Andrew’s socks and he has been married for two years. I’m sure there was some legitimate reason for them to be in my laundry basket but at the moment, I’m not sure what that is. You’d think I hadn’t sorted socks in years, but really I have! However, sock sorting is a never ending job when you have BOYS/MEN in the house. (Kudos to my daughter, Kara Beth, who is also married and apparently took her socks with her!)
The renegade items were there too. A Christmas hand towel. A dishcloth. A pair of shorts that needed a button sewn on. And it went on from there as I worked my way through basket number one onto basket number two.
The Starting Point
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Sometimes the processes of our lives could be best represented by a circle. We start at a certain point, sure that we have all the answers, cocky, self-assured, ready to conquer the world and move aside all the poor fools who have so much less understanding than we do. However, life with its hard knocks and deep valleys, has a way of enlightening us and leveling the ground of our self-importance. We often find that we weren’t quite as “right” as we first thought. We come full circle and learn to see the wisdom in some of the ones who have gone before us in this journey called life. We experience hurt and pain. We are wounded.
And a most peculiar thing happens for those who open their hearts to learn. We find that our wounds have the potential of becoming a source of healing for others.
I suppose that we have two basic choices when life wounds us – and it always does in one way or another. We can shake our fists at the pain, curse those who brought it, and become angry, resentful, and bitter, demanding payment from the world and life itself for surely we deserve retribution for the wrongs committed against us. Or we can allow God to bring beauty out of our woundedness.
If we are to truly make a difference in this life, it seems to me that the starting place for that is the place of our woundedness. Why would such a thing be true?
Making the Right Choice
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We make a thousand choices every day, beginning from the first moment our eyes open.
Will I get up now?
Or will I stay in bed a little longer?
Will I drink one cup of coffee or two?
Creamer or black?
Breakfast or not?
Check my email?
Facebook?
Twitter?
Shower?
Wash my hair?
Read my Bible?
Meditate?
Exercise?
In fact, our ability to choose is one of the ways that we are made in the image of God and it is one of the things that has confounded mankind for centuries. Why would God give us the ability – and the right- to choose incorrectly? Why would God allow us to make choices that would harm us – even to the extent of choosing heaven or hell? Well, that is a theological debate for another day – or not – I’ll choose later:)
I’ve often heard it said we make our own choices, and then those choices make us. How painfully true I’ve found that to be at times! But on the flip side, our good choices make room for a good results in our lives.
