christian living on Procrastination

Holy God, we confess that we have been lukewarm about living our faith in Jesus each day. We put off to tomorrow what we know in our hearts you want to happen today. We go through the motions of relig...

Halloween is the beginning of the holiday shopping season. That’s for women. The beginning of the holiday shopping season for men is Christmas Eve.

The habit of always putting off an experience until you can afford it, or until the time is right, or until you know how to do it is one of the greatest burglars of joy. Be deliberate, but once you...

One of the great disadvantages of hurry is that it takes such a long time.

I am a slow walker, but I never walk back.

In a study at UC Berkeley conducted by Adrianna Jenkins and Ming Hsu, it was discovered imagination may be the pathway needed to uncover patience. The study found when we imagine possible outcomes, it...

What you call “worry” . . . I call “preparation.”

Delayed gratification may be an important key to success in life, points out Mark Batterson. In a variety of experiments, the most famous from 1972, Walter Mischel studied how young children delayed g...

We are too anxious to be able to wait for fruit and time to ripen, so we take the shortcuts of robbery and violence, even the torture of little children; sin leads to crimes against both nature and ou...

I generally avoid temptation unless I can’t resist it.

The cure for impatience with the fulfillment of God's timetable is to believe His promises, obey His will, and leave the results to Him. So often when God's timetable stretches into years we b...

My counselor gave me the strangest advice a few months ago. Almost out of the blue, she said, “You should start waiting in the longest lines you can find.” She meant everywhere—at the grocery store, g...

He may delay because it would not be safe to give us at once what we ask: we are not ready for it. To give ere we could truly receive, would be to destroy the very heart and hope of prayer, to cease t...

Patience is bitter, but its fruit is sweet.

We must learn to see our limits as the entrance into the good life, not what bars us from it. But as we grow older, waiting feels like an inconvenience or affront. We take out our phones when we’re...

Never mistake motion for action.

Patience is power. Patience is not an absence of action; rather it is 'timing' it waits on the right time to act, for the right principles and in the right way.

Poet Donald Hall told the story of a hermit in New Hampshire, a man who passed away leaving behind sheds full of hoarded stuff. In one of the sheds was a box labeled, “string too short to be saved.” ...

Lose an hour in the morning, chase it all day

Patience is a hard discipline. It is not just waiting until something happens over which we have no control: the arrival of the bus, the end of the rain, the return of a friend, the resolution of a co...

Failures are divided into two classes — those who thought and never did, and those who did and never thought.

The adjective busy set as a modifier to pastor should sound to our ears like adulterous to characterize a wife, or embezzling to describe a banker. It is an outrageous scandal, a blasphemous affront. ...

Gracious God, when I think of how you created all things in a step-by-step manner, I am reminded of my own impatience. There are so many times, Lord, when I want you to move at my pace, not yours. I c...

I say my prayers, I read a book of devotion, I prepare for, or receive, the Sacrament. But while I do these things there is, so to speak, a voice inside me that urges caution. It tells me to be carefu...

Not long ago I came upon a wreck on a road that leads from our national office to our local church. It appeared that the wreck had happened only minutes before I arrived. A car was completely overturn...

Great things are not accomplished by idle dreams, but by years of patient study.

I’m sitting at a traffic light in my neighborhood, waiting for the red light to turn. I’m trying to be relaxed and unhurried about my life. Before I have a chance to respond to the light that has just...

Building anticipation into one's preaching simply calls for one basic understanding of the task of the pulpit: the goal is not to get something said but to get something heard.

The repetition of small efforts will accomplish more than the occasional use of great talents.

It is better to have a hen tomorrow than an egg today.