evading hypnosis...

Feel free to totally ignore this post.

Especially if you're addicted to texting.

Have you noticed the people on the street?  Everywhere you look people aren't looking back at you looking at them 'cause they're looking at the little glowing screen in front of them.  

Busy texting.

And I'm totally in-favor of communication and connectivity and community--I believe we have been made to be together so I'm not railing against that or against technology (I spend half my career in show biz after all).

But watching people on the street in New York City and in Los Angeles and downtown Toronto I can't help but feel like the intensity of our texting and constant communicating has ratcheted up lately.

Have you noticed?

And this is the thing that occurred to me.  A friend of mine who's a very successful preacher/pastor/author put it this way;

"You need to make sure you don't end up just working 'in' your Church, you need to work 'on' your Church as well."

His point was that we can easily get sucked into managing the minutiae of running a Church and forget that the goal--with church planting--is to obey God in strategic partnership as Jesus Christ, through the ongoing work of the Holy Spirit, builds His Church through your focused efforts and the efforts of those partnered with you.

Efforts that need to be strategic and tactical.

This is true of your actual life and career as well.

And the thing that's got me thinking about things is the fact that text messaging, or twittering, or even email is--by nature--a short-form medium that restricts our exchanges to small bite-sized bits.  Which means you can send and receive many bits and need to send and receive many bits to get anything across. 

So we end up constantly sending out small bits of information and checking small bits of information that have been sent to us.

And I wonder if we still have the time we need--what with all the bits and bites--to devote ourselves to strategic focus, to really thinking about the big picture of our lives.

What do you want?  Who do you want to be?  How do you intend to get there?  What difference is your life supposed to make?  What's truly most important to you?

These are big questions and my suspicion is that the answer probably won't come in tiny bits. Sure you may come to the truth one bit at a time but if there are too many bits being sent out and received by you each day--and many of them, due to the hit or miss nature of tactics without strategy, aren't necessarily effective or useful in terms of actually building what your life is supposed to be about --then you're going to be occupying 80% of your time with bits that aren't ultimately useful to your strategic trajectory.

See?

Replying to non-useful stuff or creating non-useful stuff might be taking away from the finite amount of time you have each day to actually make strategic forward progress with your life.

I'm just wondering.

Are we working 'in' our life or 'on' it as well as in it?

T