I mentioned in my blog post for last year that I was going to be more intentional about “creating margin” over the next year. In some ways, it happened, due to some intentional steps, but also some unexpected unintentional steps. Having this margin allowed for some time to reflect on my life, realizing that I had spent way too much time living in some type of “organized chaos” without any real focus on much of anything. Some recent time off work after Christmas helped me to gain some focus again in order to be more proactive instead of reactive.
Probably the biggest achievement over the past year professionally has been the research and implementation of live-broadcasting the worship services at my church on a relatively low budget, along with updating the look of the website within the confines of a template. Neither are where I want them to be, but I dare say that both are probably the best quality compared to others in the area. All that said, now that I’ve got past a couple of major projects over the past couple of years, I feel the need to get back to some basics of ministry, to focus more on people instead of tasks, and to be more pastoral.
Healthwise, despite currently being on “injured reserve” due to a pinched nerve resulting from a recent car accident, I feel that I’m in the best shape I’ve been over the past 20 years. I decided a few months ago to plan my workouts over the course of two-week intervals and became part of a group of guys who play basketball in the pool at the local YMCA three mornings as week. We play 21. The games can get intense, but the result is a great cardio workout. My A1C level has been the lowest it’s been since I became a Type-2 diabetic, and I’ve been able to come off two of the four medications over the past year I’ve been taking.
Recently, I came across the phrase mens sana in corpore sano, which is translated from Latin to mean, “a healthy mind in a healthy body.” I’ve done a lot to get what I feel is a healthy body, and I want to work more on the healthy mind. I’ve incorporated meditation into a regular practice, using the app Oak by Kevin Rose. I also want to focus on creating healthy habits in order to alleviate the stress that life brings, including a focused devotional time and journaling.
If you haven’t noticed by now, my theme for the upcoming year is focus. I felt over the past year that I just allowed life to happen and in some ways just ended up surviving a lot of days. Now, I want to be more of a “captain and commander” of my time, as David Allen puts it. So more intention will be put in to the day-to-day operations of life. I want to read more, to write more (since obviously the last post in from a year ago), and to continue to work on the work-life balance and mind-body balance. Now that I’m in my early-forties, I’m excited to see where all of this will take me.