In high school, I remember having practice every night for the soccer team. I think we practiced for three hours each evening for months. It was a lot of practice, but we were a pretty good team, so it was worth it.
I don't often think about training my faith in the same way. Would I dedicate three hours each evening to my faith? I'd say that I'm too busy now, but what if I really believed that it might shape the kind of person I'm growing in to for all of eternity? We make time for the things we really value -- so shouldn't I be ready and willing to make time to train for godliness? The workouts I do each morning have physical value... but godliness training has eternal value.
It's one of these things we know... but the impact of godliness training is stretched out over such a long time that we minimize it's value in our lives. Other things seem more pressing, even if they're not. We often tend to what is urgent, taking the same approach as a trauma doctor, tackling what's pressing first. So we let our training in godliness slide.
I don't have an easy answer as to how to reorganize our priorities. I'm still working on mine. But step one is admitting that we have a priority problem, and then spending time thinking about rearranging priorities to recognize the difference between the eternal and the urgent.
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