prioritising priorities

I can remember a lecture at the Vicar Factory where I trained (the awesome Spurgeon’s College if you are interested). That statement may surprise you for two reasons: one is that I can remember a lecture, the second is that I actually am trained.

Anyhoo… the lecture was in my final year when we were learning some of the practical aspects of being a minister and we were exploring how we prioritise. We were shown a matrix with four words – urgent, important, non-urgent and unimportant. The advice was to deal with things in the following order… urgent and important, non-urgent and important, urgent and unimportant and non-urgent and unimportant. It is sound advice.

But it doesn’t always work in practice. If I focus on the urgent and important I may well spend my whole life reacting to events and working up against deadlines. I will find myself running around doing worthy things but feeling that I am not in control. There is a time and a place to stop, set aside the urgent and important and simply rest in God’s presence, relax in a bath or watch a film with friends (probably not a good idea to try to do all three at once!). This is what God means by recreation. We all need time and space to be re-created, to chill, to breathe gently and to be blessed.

possibly only funny if you have seen the film, watch EastEnders and know about old-style printers…

I am conscious of that this week as I am going to a three-day Ministers’ Conference where I hope to receive, re-charge and recreate. One thing that this could mean is that five days of work will need to be crammed into two days at the end of the week. That is if I allow myself to be dominated by the matrix. But sometimes we need to realise that the matrix is not the only reality (see what I did there?) and place a priority on us receiving as well as giving.

Of course such things as recreation are urgent and important, but if we are honest we know that somehow they don’t seem like that to us or to others.

By the way, I am hoping to carry on blogging at the Conference if they have wifi but please forgive me if there are a couple of blank days…