In that past few post I have spoken about the trials of growth and getting through the tough times. I simply want to note that dramatic transformative growth is often times the accumulation of numerous consistently applied small choices.
This lesson keeps coming back to me in my own life, and I really need to listen to the wisdom of it more. Here are a few examples of what I am talking about from the epiphanal moments when I experientially grasped the power of incremental action over a long period of time.
One the first times this principle began to come home to me was four years ago when I decided to work on simplicity by purging a grocery sack a day of items from my home for forty days. If I had made it a goal during Lent to go through every closet, drawer, and room in our house, each car, our carport, and my closets, desks, and books at work, I really doubt I would have accomplished it. However, by opting to just do one bag a day for forty days, I did go through all of those spaces and radically made a difference in my relationship to material objects. I realized that adopting a process and consistently applying it repeatedly was a powerful tool.
This lesson came home to me again recently when I reviewed the evolution of my blog. I helped a friend of mine get a blog started and I wanted to encourage him because I felt that he might be getting discouraged by a lack of traffic. I went back and looked at The Practical Disciple during its birth and discovered that during the first three months I had no traffic until the last two days of that first quarter and then I got of handful of visits. Three months and basically no one visited! Now though, 10 months later, through consistently applied tiny steps, I have had over a 1100 visit originating from 18 countries (one even from the
Vatican City) with about 50 subscribers, and in the process I wrote 91 posts, which is approximately 120+ single spaced pages of material. Now if you had asked me to write a book and get four or five hundred people to check it out in less than a year, I would have thought you were nuts and that it was impossible. However, through incremental action consistently applied that’s essentially what has happened.
The other closely related lesson I learned is that you don’t need to know the whole picture before getting started. You just keep taking the next step no matter how small it may seem. If I had set out to create a blog with subscriber capability, audio components, visual components, a way to track statistics, visual material to break up the monotony of a bunch of texts and a host of other little features. I would still be staring at a computer with little to show for it. I just picked one or two things to do and kept writing, and kept layering. Once again, small consistently applied incremental action resulted in significant accomplishment.
Lastly, this applies to our emotional and spiritual lives as well. A few years ago I was really struggling with depression. I was shutting down as a functioning person. I remember that the journey back to good mental health began with making myself write down each evening three things I looked forward to the next day. Being depressed, I honestlydidn’t look forward to much. I usually had to fabricate something to look forward to, such as, “I look forward to matching a movie with my kids.” Small actions steps like that repeatedly taken were life saving for me.
So what’s an area of discipleship that you really need to grow in? prayer, worship, mission, fellowship, evangelism, study, etc? What is a very simple first step that you can take pretty immediately and repeat over and over again. Do you want to read the Bible? Then start reading even just one chapter at a time. Do you want to pray more? Then start using a daily devotional. Commit to something incremental. Commit to an action that takes no more than 5-7 minutes that you can do daily. At first, you will feel like you are accomplishing little and then one day you will find yourself saying, “Wow, how did I get here.”
Blessings to you in the little things, from The Practical Disciple
Very practical….Mr. Practical Disciple he he he. Breaking any activity into small steps brings it down to the manageable arena. Every journey begins with a single step.
My area of discipleship to journey into is reading the Bible. I want to get all the way through it. I finished the New Testament and half of the Old but I has put it down for a while. I picked it back up this week and have read 2 or 3 chapters every day. I want to finish so then I can go back and study some things more intensely life the feasts of the Lord.
I also plan on purging stuff in my house to just have less clutter. I will take up your “looking forward to” writing task and want to be more authentic with my relationship with God. I am ready to be a together person. I am tired of feeling addicted to stuff, feeling depressed, feeling like there is more to a relationship with God and with people. I am tired of living in clutter. I am ready for healthy.