SEVENTY OR EIGHTY THINGS FOR WHICH LIFE IS TOO SHORT

Life is too short...

1. To complain about your spouse’s housekeeping when you can just as well do it yourself.

2. To wash the dishes 3 times a day, unless you have visitors, free labor, like children or grandchildren, if it is only you and your spouse.

3. To try being a millionaire by working or striving.

4. To worry about what you don’t get done in a day.

5. To keep up with changing fashions when classics are always in style and dignity.

6. To wash your car every week.

7. To do 115% on a menial job when 95% of perfection will do well and in half the time.

8. To make children do things your way when it is not a matter of morality, safety, or efficiency.

9. To spend a day without reading God’s word, a newspaper, and some pages in a good book.

10. To lie in bed when you can’t sleep when you can get up and do something significant.

11. To quarrel with your spouse just to win an argument.

12. To be distracted by grudges longer than 60 seconds.

13. To wear yourself out so you can rest or take a vacation.

14. To live for yourself, even if you tithe your money.

15. To skip a day without prayer.

16. To maintain an acre of lawn.

17. To worry about yesterday or tomorrow.

18. To neglect your family for anything.

19. To take everything seriously, especially your own opinions.

20. To worry about your failing faculties.

21. To remake your spouse or anyone else into your image.

22. To ignore a child’s cry for love and withhold support and a hug. .

23. To lavish love on yourself with selfish entertainment such as TV when there is someone right there to love, like a child trying to crawl onto your lap, begging for your attention.

24. To make excuses when the real reason is, you just don’t care enough to act.

25. To live the unexamined life.

26. To hesitate when the obvious is before you.

27. To wait to enjoy your family until they are a bit older

28. To watch programs like Feed the Children and World Vision, and grow old when others can’t because you only watched the programs and did nothing about it. .

29. To mope over your failed dreams when you can pray and let God do it a better way.

30. To strive after wealth which does not satisfy.

31. To put off until tomorrow to do the good you should have done yesterday or today.

32. To wait for a better day to share the good news of Jesus.

33. To live without priorities and goals.

34. To lose sleep over what might have been rather than considering insomnia a gift of God for fellowship with Him.

35. To worry about the rainy days at the end of life.

36. To grow older with desperate needs around us and delay in doing anything about them.

37. To repay a fraction of our debt to God for his habitual goodness to us.

38. To live for the day you can retire.

39. To hope you will feel more like helping the poor tomorrow

40. To stop sowing good deeds until you see the fruit of your work.

41. To let secret sins stifle your faithful service to God.

42. To stay depressed over strained relationships.

43. To take a long summer vacation ever year when you need only half that amount to touch base with family and church to rejuvenate.

44. To stand there buttoning a long shirt front when you’re chaffing at the bit to get on with life.

45. To let months and years slide by without filling them with activity of eternal consequences.

46. To allow other’s negativism to get under your skin and hinder your service to God.

47. To take a long vacation when you are restless to be immersed in meaningful activity of service that is waiting for you.

48. To let marriage difficulties hang and not seeking understanding and resolution.

49. To live with personal moral dilemmas and bondage.

50. To let would be visitors wait at the door just because you have had enough visitors for a day.

51. To worry in the night about matters you know you can solve better by sunlight.

52. To neglect hobbies involving nature and the great outdoors by which you can share God’s joy of creation.

53. To be ignorant and unobservant and miss half the show of life.

54. To be concerned only with news and not reflect the meaning of happenings

55. To let another year go by and not be 365 days ahead of the past.

56. To remember, record, and photograph every interesting and special thing that happens.

57. To memorize all your ancestral connections back to your original immigrant, unless it comes easily.

58. To limit yourself to one culture when the world is full of colorful and curious cultures.

59. To coast along in the life span with only your own age group and ignore the energy and optimism of youth and the wisdom and contentment of the elderly.

60. To follow one’s own plans and miss the best way of God

61. To lie awake at night idly thinking when one could be up and doing something constructive in the environment of the home, the mind, or God.

62. To be patient with an unconstructive or unfruitful life.

63. To retire from life before God takes you away.

64. To start doing something good until you have it all figured out and everyone approves.

65. To save for a rainy day when it is flooding all around you right now in the global village.

66. To only look back without a vision for the future.

67. To see the years slip by without knowing what happened. (What did happen, anyway?)

68. To have any hobby that consumes a great deal of time before you are in wheel chair.

69. To spend most of your life making payments on your house.

70. To spend any more time dreaming up more of these philosophical ideas.

      

UPDATED AT 80 YEARS

71  Spend half your earning life paying off the house you live in.

72. Spend more years of pursuing education than you will find useful in your life.

73 To wait to really know your children until they are grown up.

74.To spend long weeks just to make a better living.

75. To wait until you are secure financially to find out what was really God's plan for your life.
     
76. To neglect learning to enjoy nature as God's wonderful home meant for you and everyone.
     
 77.To give second place to God when you expect to spend eternity with him.

78. To fail to show personal love to your spouse every day. (if you marry)

 79. To not observe how your parents went before you into their aging years; you will be there before you realize what happened.

  80. To realize how short life really is until it is almost gone.

               7 Things Happy Couples Do Daily

1.        Kiss- to boost your self-esteem

2.                 Hug- to decrease stress

3.                 Listen- to build trust

4.                 Cuddle- to boost your immune system

5.                 Forgive- to clear negative energy

6.                 Laugh- to boost intimacy

7.                 Say “I love you”- to live long together

      These 7 things are small actions but will deeply

       strengthen relationships when done daily.

      From “Power of Positivity"                     

                                                      Is God All We Need?                                            

I am a bit uneasy when we sing songs that affirm that God is all we need. It seems to be saying on the surface that God himself is our only support and commitment in whom we have total faith, which seems pious and devoted to God. But it seems to ignore we have needs that are met through God's ways and not through him alone in praise, worship or trust and commitment. Let's explore how God has set up the support we all need which may not be from him directly as the songs seem to assume and imply.

When God made man and placed him in the Garden of Eden, man's relationship to God was free and unspoiled and we assume they talked to each other freely. Yet God said that it was not good for the man to be alone by himself; and so he made a woman to be his counterpart to fill a need he had created in man. It wasn't enough for God to be God with a perfect relationship with man. Man needed a person next to him who was more like himself.

It also was not enough for the couple to have each other. They needed to have the joy of creativity God had created in them. Thus God enabled them to have children. So he fulfilled the nature of his own creativity by that ennoblement of sex and procreation. .

He also placed them in the Garden. They needed an environment. He set it up and then they were to care for it themselves.  Ever since then man has been caring and perfecting his environment so that today we have cities, houses, and many beautiful things. People shape their setting at more than necessity because of their need for perfection in their environment, more as God had created for them.

So more than man being sufficient in relating to God, he also needed a human element for completion of his needs, and the ability to reproduce. Then further, the drive to create the best world he could to live in. Man was not satisfied and still isn't content to just have a relationship with God, even though restored in Jesus. Christians as well are never satisfied with just having God, as if he met all their needs and interests, as some of their songs may imply or idealize. God wanted more for man then simply being man’s only support, to be satisfied with only a relationship with him. So he created him with many ways related to his fellow humans and environment. We need a lot! That is how God made us. Is that why we try to come back and sing that all we really need is God?  Kind of an over-correction. Perhaps it would be more correct to sing that God provides a way for all our needs, and be ever grateful for that.

                                             What is Salvation (For)?

It seems to me salvation in the Christian faith may be emphasized in 3 or 4 ways. Individuals, congregations and denomination emphasize one or more of these ways which follow the tradition of any of these groups. While we cannot insist that only one is correct, it seems to me we should be reminded to examine what our options are and see if we as believers should consider if our emphasis of salvation corresponds to Jesus' life, teaching, and the life of the early church and NT writings.

A basic meaning of salvation is to be saved from our sins and sinful life with its consequences. Some churches emphasize this aspect so that every service must help persons in the audience to know how to be saved and to having an “invitation” for persons to make a public stand- perhaps literally for Christ and repentant from sin. This is to ACCEPT Jesus as Lord and Savior. The point here is that while this is certainly important, it  is only one option of emphasis to experience salvation.

A second option is to assume that the church's main public stance on salvation is to worship. When we are in corporate worship or in personal ”devotions” we worship him with thanksgiving and surrender ourselves to him  This may be the stance of the saved, at whatever level of understanding or maturity the worshiper has come to at any point. Commitment is assumed but not focused on. To give God the glory is the meaning and chief expression of our salvation.

A third focus may to be a part of a fellowship and a commitment to that fellowship and to live out the Christian life in the cooperate life of the church. Believers have so much in common, and their commitment to each other and the establishment of faith is paramount to salvation. The Amish may be the best example of this concept of salvation. Unity is very important and pattern and specificity is an expression of them of being saved. Yet assurance of salvation is not important, in this understanding but being a loyal obedient church member is the best one can do, trusting God for our eventual salvation. When you join the church as a member, you are moving toward full salvation by God's grace. 

A fourth understanding of salvation and expression is seen in working out one's love to God and commitment to him by being in service in the world. The goal is for all people in the world to know God's love and accept the life and faith which we have from our Lord Jesus. If “God so loved the world that he gave his only son” then the highest repression of being children of God is to give ourselves in love to the world so that they “will not be lost but have eternal life. The typical expressions of this nature of salvation are in witness, missions, and service to humanity. It is expressed in the belief of being “saved to serve” as the basic expressions of our salvation. If you can keep your salvation to yourself, it is very narrow and self-centered and hardly real.

These four options of chief emphases are not mutually exclusive  but illustrated so that a choice can be made on how we may best express the meaning of salvation as we find it in the teachings of Jesus, the “Acts of the Apostles and the NT writings. The forth option, which is the most drastic for the church and believers, assumes all the others, but spells out a perspective  that makes the other come in line to accompany the Salvation of the world which is the central function of the church in the pattern of God's love for the world. All of the first 3 expressions of salvation are supportive to the end purpose of God in saving us. We are not saved just for own sake or to have a good life in the fellowship of the church, but to carry out the purpose of God in sending Jesus into the world- to save the world.

     

When one seeks to help the church really be saved and live out salvation in the fourth dimension, it soon becomes evident that the church need to be greatly overhauled in all its expressions and functions. Worship is affected.. Preaching is different. The outlook on the world is different. Is the best we can do to just shift emphasis gradually? When someone affirmed our years of service in Belize, I responded that we were only doing what everyone should be doing, only in another place. This writing is to set us to thinking what salvation is and what we are saved for. This needs much exploration