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Developing A Life Plan (ESD)

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A personal Life Plan is perhaps one of the best ways to help keep your life on track, and is a tool that can help you become the person that God created you to be. Developing a plan for your life is a critical aspect of spiritual growth, because it lays our a tangible blueprint that can help you achieve the goals that God has for your life.

Unfortunately, most people never stop to accomplish this simple task.

Blueprints

I’ve maintained a personal Life Plan for several years now, initially starting to develop my own after reading about it on Michael Hyatt’s website. Once I got my plan in place, I wrote a blog post detailing it slightly. You can read that post here.

However, over the years, I’ve tweaked my plan to fit my life like a glove. And the more I utilize this tool, the better it becomes. This one simple activity can be traced to a significant portion of my personal and spiritual growth over the last few years.

Creating a personal Life Plan is simple, but it’s not easy. It’s simple because it’s your life. You already know your plans and goals. You know yourself better than anyone else and what you want to accomplish in life, how you impact the people and things most important to you, and where you’d like to see yourself in the next few years, and longer.

But it’s not easy. It takes some work. It requires some effort. However, it is well worth the time invested.

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Top 5 Social Media Apps

With a smart phone in today’s world, there are several essential apps that come in very handy. At times it seems as if you can’t function at all without these, they’ve become so useful to us.

Social Media Apps

Regardless of whether you like or dislike social media, it seems as if it’s here to stay… at least for the foreseeable future. I’ve read many blog posts about abandoning social media for simplicity. While I think I understand what they are saying, and agree to a point, I find that I cannot do the same.

There are simply too many people that I connect with only through social media, and to give it up would be to abandon those relationships as well.

And so there are a series of apps that I find extremely helpful on this front.

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Coffee Break – 07.14.2014

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Chemex Review – I talk about the Chemex a lot, especially in the Coffee Break posts. Here’s a review of the Chemex from someone besides me, but this sums up nicely why I like mine so much. You can purchase one at Amazon.com.

The Typewriter Book – I enjoy all things writing. I’d like to own a vintage typewriter someday to write correspondence with, among other things. Someone wrote a comprehensive history of the typewriter. This book would fascinate me. It’s now added to my wishlist.

Saving Private Smith – Maybe you’ve seen the movie Saving Private Ryan. If not, you need to watch it. What most people don’t know is that the scenario played out in the movie parallels one from real life, from Great Britain. This was a very interesting historical article.

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Memorize Scripture: 2 Timothy 4:3

Much of Paul’s letters to Timothy read like a commentary on today’s society, even though he wrote these two thousand years ago. This week’s passage seems especially so.

You can find it in 2 Timothy 4:3:

2 Timothy 4:3

In the first couple of verses of this passage, Paul charged Timothy to stand firm, preaching the Word of God with boldness. In this next verse, he explains why this is necessary and urgent.

The need for Timothy to be patient is critical. He will soon be entering some difficult times for Christianity, and Paul is about to describe what those times will be like. The situation that begins during Timothy’s ministry has sunk lower and lower throughout the centuries, and we see the continual progression of this today.

What is the problem that Timothy faced, and we face now? It is a lack of commitment to “sound doctrine,” the Word of God. Paul warned that very quickly, people would not want to be faced with the truth of Scripture, or the conviction that comes with it.

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Top 5 Productivity Apps

For the longest time, I was a BlackBerry user. I carried one of those devices for several years, and enjoyed its capabilities. But, inevitably, I had to let it go. There simply were not enough applications being developed for it, to meet my needs and wants. I switched to an Apple iPhone 4, and haven’t looked back

Productivity Apps

As I learned how to navigate the world of the iPhone, I found that there were tons more apps available, plus more in development, and they seemed to be much more stable than the old platform I’d been using.

I was more than satisfied with my options. Soon after I made the switch, Apple released the iPhone 4s. I did not upgrade. The added feature of Siri wasn’t enough justify the purchase. When the iPhone 5 hit the market, I drug my feet again, waiting until the iPhone 5s was released before I pulled the trigger on a new purchase.

With that purchase, I upgraded by three generations, and increased my storage capacity by a huge margin from the 8G that I currently had. It made a world of difference in almost every way.

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12 Ways To Live As Citizens Of The Kingdom Of God

As a minister, I’ve been asked a wide variety of questions, some valid, others not so much. Probably one of the questions I hear most often is how to grow as a Christian, or how to grow in righteousness.

Kingdom

Psalm 15 is a brief, and yet detailed account of this very thing. In the previous psalm, David wrote about the folly and the wickedness of mankind. In this psalm, though, he looks at the other side of the coin. He describes what a citizen of the kingdom of heaven looks like.

Over the years, a wide variety of books have been written about this topic. Some of them are worth reading, others are not. Some give some excellent pointers, others seem to offer very little help at all.

But David’s brief description in this psalm offers several key characteristics to develop, and a few to avoid as well.