A Birthday Blog

 Teach us to number our days aright, that we may gain a heart of wisdom. Psalm 90:12 (NIV 1984)

Today, March 23, 2021, is a perfect day to reflect on this verse. Why? Because today is my 70^th birthday! On such a life milestone as this, I can’t help but review with gratitude the phenomenal opportunities God has packed into my life until now and then ponder what He might still have in mind for me in the years ahead. Whatever the case, today is a good time to consider just what it means to “number our days aright” and be a good steward of time.

I have enjoyed teaching about the stewardship of time in my Africa Steward Leader seminars during the past decade, and I have often used the analogy of looking at the squares on a calendar as a series of empty cardboard boxes. God gives every single person the same-sized box each day of our lives—a twenty-four-hour-sized box. No favoritism here! It doesn’t matter if you are wealthy or poor, healthy or weak, from the Global North or Global South—we all get the same size box every day of our lives. But even though God is involved in determining the size of our box, He allows us to decide much of what goes in it. There are times, of course, when He will direct us through circumstances He brings our way, but for the most part, how we choose to invest those twenty-four hours each day is up to us. Making those choices is where good time stewardship fits in.

I have never found a more useful tool for making wise, daily stewardship choices than the “Time Management Matrix” presented in Steven Covey’s classic book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. The simplicity of breaking down what we do into four quadrants defined by Important, Not Important and Urgent, Not Urgent is what makes it so powerful. Anyone glancing at the matrix can immediately see the wisdom of not allowing the less important things of Quadrants 3 and 4 to crowd out the urgent things of Quadrant 1 or the most important parts of our life in Quadrant 2. However, as much as I have taught this tool for daily decision-making, I admit that the discipline of actually applying it on a daily basis is not easy. Nevertheless, my own challenge (and my challenge to you) is to make this discipline as much a part of daily practice as possible. In my mind, it is definitely one way to “number our days aright.”  

How to fill up each daily box is one level of time stewardship—call it the micro level of seconds, minutes, hours, and days. But the verse says, “Teach us to number our days” (plural), which also calls for a macro level of time stewardship that deals with weeks, months, years, and possibly even seasons of life. In this case, I have found another extremely valuable tool that has helped my own assessment of where I am in life and what my focus should be. It comes from Dr. Robert (Bobby) Clinton’s “Leadership Emergence Theory” first described in his book The Making of a Leader. Not only does Clinton propose six distinct life phases that most godly leaders experience, but he also says that the most effective leaders are those who perceive their lives with increasing perspective of how God is leading and guiding them. At least twice in my life, I experienced a sudden and somewhat traumatic career change. Being able to overlay Clinton’s life-phase map over my own timeline was a huge help at those transition moments and helped me gain the perspective I needed to embrace the new phase with purposeful intention and, most importantly, personal peace. Looking back, I can’t help but think it was exactly what I needed to “number my days aright”—to develop appreciation for the new season of life God had led me to, to be better and not bitter. To this day, I am grateful for Bobby Clinton’s wisdom in providing such a useful tool as well as his own personal words of counsel.

So now, I feel like I am standing at the threshold of another important life phase. What exactly the future will hold for a 70-year-old guy like me, I can’t be sure. There’s nothing like this past year of COVID-19 to teach me that life will always have unexpected surprises. However, I am actually excited about this next season of life, regardless of the unknowns. What I am sure about is that this is no time to stop “numbering my days aright,” both at the micro (daily) level as well as the macro (life-season) level because I know this is how God will keep transforming my heart with His truth, His love, and His wisdom.

 

Stewarding our Daily Bread

(This blog was originally written for the Christian Leadership Alliance's Higher Thinking blog site.) 

Gives us this day our daily bread, Matthew 6:11

This tiny verse tucked into the very middle of the Lord’s Prayer has been a great text passage for sermons on God’s faithful providence. But have you ever stopped to think how much this verse also teaches us about being a faithful steward?

During this past year, my wife and I have set out to learn what we can about the craft of bread-baking. Even though we’ve been making bread off and on during our forty-four years of marriage, I am amazed how much more there was to learn about what goes into to baking a really great loaf of bread. On top of that, I’ve also been impressed how much making and eating bread has taught me about two key stewardship principles: sufficiency and renewal.

The principle of sufficiency has to do with knowing when enough is enough. It speaks directly to how a faithful steward must make wise use of the master’s resources, of not being wasteful, of learning how contentment and satisfaction must mitigate our natural tendencies toward selfish greed. Nowhere in Scripture is this principle illustrated better than when God provided mana in the desert for the Children of Israel (Exodus 16.) He provided a food source for them in adequate abundance but then instructed to only gather what was sufficient for each day. Anything gathered beyond what was needed for that day would spoil.

Bread baking also illustrates this well. Although there are a lot of extra ingredients you can add to bread dough, a basic loaf of bread only needs four things: flour, water, yeast, and salt. But these ingredients must be measured out in sufficient quantities. Our contemporary cultural thinking that “more is better” certainly does not apply here because adding too much of any one of these four things will ruin the loaf of bread. This is especially true of yeast. One might think that the more yeast one uses, the more the bread dough will rise. Not true! Too much yeast will produce, among other things, too much ethanol by-product during the proofing process causing the bread to taste “yeasty” and somewhat sour. But in the proper sufficient quantity, yeast will produce just the right amount of carbon dioxide gas to cause the dough to rise, and just enough of ethanol (which boils off during baking) to give the bread a great flavor.

The Lord’s Prayer request in Matthew is not just for bread, but for daily bread. This means the plea to our Father is for a renewal of his provision on a daily basis. If He gives us just what is sufficient for yesterday, that means we will need it resupplied again today. Once again, God’s provision of mana in the desert illustrated this as the Israelites discovered a fresh allowance of their food need every morning of each new day. Similarly, with our bread-baking, my wife and I find that a home-made loaf is great for two, three, maybe four days max. But the freshness of bread, which is at its peak when you take it out of the oven, will begin to decrease from that moment on. The inside will lose its moisture and become stiff and chewy while the crust will lose its crunchiness absorbing some of that moisture. The result is bread starting to taste stale. That is why we now make a small loaf that is sufficient for two or three days and then renew the process with another fresh loaf after that.

It doesn’t take much effort to think of how these two stewardship principles have all sorts of applications in our daily lives. Disciplining ourselves in accepting what is sufficient can apply to the temptation of overbuying at a Costco sale and turning down that unnecessary fourth piece of pizza as well as rejecting the super-sized french-fry offer at MacDonald’s. And a commitment to renewal can relate to everything from regular oil changes for our car or lawnmower blade reconditioning as it can to refreshing relationships by spending more quality time spent with our spouse, kids, or neighbors.  How about a little discussion tonight around the dinner table to brainstorm other applications you could be more intentional about with your family?

If nothing else, I hope from now on every time you bite into a slice of bread, it will be a great reminder of how you can be an ever more faithful steward by practicing the principles of sufficiency and renewal.

(Note: In case you’re curious about how to make the super-simple, no-knead home-made bread described and pictured above, feel free to contact me at jonlewis23@gmail.com. – Jon.)