15 Minute Challenge
What time do you get up each day?
I usually get up around 5:00 AM, while the rest of my family gets up around 6:00 AM during the school year. My plan has always been to use this uninterrupted hour for a devotional time and also to do some work for my job before everyone else gets up.
The problem is, I get up at 5:00 AM as usual, but doing what I want to do and what I actually do turn out to be quite different!
I usually end up wasting most of this time – usually spent on my phone reading the news, personal email, social media or the latest weather forecast. Basically I do everything else except my devotional time before I realize I haven’t even started it and it is almost 6:00 AM!
A Real Christian Businessman knows that in order to start the day off right, we need to make having our devotional time the #1 priority when we get up. I need to put down the phone until I have read my devotional and studied the bible. What is it, a whole 15 minutes maybe? I can’t be without my phone for a measly 15 minutes when I first wake up?
This is hard for me to do, because I am so conditioned to think I need to “check” my phone as I may have missed something while I slept these last 6-7 hours. The weather forecast may have changed! I may have received an earth shattering email or social media post that will alter my life! Something happened in the world that I need to know about immediately!
This is all nonsense! Making our time with God a priority over everything else will reward us in ways that doing other things first can never do.
“And rising very early in the morning, while it was still dark, (Jesus) departed and went out to a desolate place, and there he prayed.” Mark 1:35 (ESV)
Let’s both start off our week tomorrow by trying the 15 minute challenge – leave our phones and all other things alone for the first 15 minutes of the day and instead have our devotional time first.
Can you do it?
I’m gonna try!