Daily Dose 31: Benefits of the Time Cycles

Refreshment and security are wonderful benefits of the time cycles. In their own way, each different cycle offers an opportunity to start fresh. Most provide a chance to view our lives and time from the hilltop, or from the air, rather than from the trenches. The very fact that the time cycles return provides a sense of security, a  hope that a solution to troubles must be closer.

Cycles also provide built-in opportunities for accountability. We have little outside oversight in the home, therefore we must initiate ways to hold ourselves accountable. Tying evaluation times and experimental projects to specific time cycles is a fabulous way to accomplish this.

Fresh Time Intentions built on Departed Time Reviews

Fresh time really should arrive arm-in-arm with a personal review of how  recently departed time was spent. Fresh hours, fresh days, and fresh years arrive healthy and ready for intentional living under His guidance,IF we have done some specific thinking about what happened during the departed time.  Were we fully alert to His leadership? Did we let pressure get the upper hand? Was our planning spot on, completely missing, or somewhere in-between? What changes would see us better yielded to Him the next time around? Anything else that might have been done differently?

Fresh cycles also offer a ready-built way to plan shifting our concentration and focus during EO times so we can develop different character and skills in a thousand different ways: we can concentrate on a different exercise each day, a different type of reading each week, a specific character quality each month, and/or a new skill each year. Over a period of time–and through an array of cycles–we become balanced and complete specimens of godliness in numerous easy-to-neglect areas.

Reminders of a Different Future from the Current Tasks

One easy-to-overlook benefit of cycles: they can remind us of a coming future when a current opportunity will be gone. Every school year (or semester for the college-aged) offers a “fresh start” for the responsibility of fitting our minds for His service. But each fresh term should also prompt us to think ahead to that day when enforced tutoring will (finally) end, and we will be expected to take over lifelong learning for ourselves. How well are we preparing now for that event? What unhelpful baggage are we packing now that we will still be dragging around with us then? Are we building habits of NOT wanting to read on our own? Of NOT adequately preparing for deadlines? Are we nurturing habits of expecting spoon-fed information and honest opinions without investing our own research time to find answers?

Contented in Time

Rather that wishing we were older when we are younger, or younger when we are older; rather than wanting children before it is time or not wanting children when it is time; rather than yearning for any stage that is not NOW, we should cultivate a delight in learning what the Lord wants us to know in NOW.  When those lessons are learned, we will be genuinely prepared for whatever the next stage brings when it arrives.