We bought a house last Thursday. And someone got the bright idea to paint the whole thing—ceiling and walls. I don’t remember if it was my wife or me, but I’ll go ahead and take the blame.
Well, it’s taken far more time than we thought it would. We started Friday, worked all weekend, and hopefully will have it done by the time this post goes live.
But I woke up Monday morning with that deadline looming over me, a two-week vacation driving the east coast ahead, and a move on Friday. My email inbox was piled high with emergencies and I still had to work ahead so I wouldn’t go broke somewhere south of Seattle.
I was stressed. Mega.
Sure, I wanted to just curl up into a ball and cry. My mind was certainly there. But I decided to suck it up and move along.
Fortunately, my pastor had given the whole church some wise advice the day before. His message wasn’t really about stress or anything. But he talked about taking things one step at a time. The words came back to me as I took a deep breath and shoved out everything that was coming up in the next few days.
All I had to do was get six things done by noon. Then the rest I could worry about later.
I actually hid everything else on my list, and just focused on those six things.
It’s amazing…I got them all done. And even more. It turns out, I didn’t need to be stressed at all.
Sometimes that’s what we need to do. Get temporary amnesia and reduce our work load to one small window of the day. Get that done, then move onto the next window.
You’ll find you had plenty of time to get everything done, and you didn’t need to stress about everything on the horizon.