I remember a few years ago when my wife was in the final stages of planning our youngest daughter's wedding. She seemed to have managed to remain stress-free, while I was stressed out thinking about paying for it. I kept having to remind myself that God was our provider; while she kept planning as if she KNEW for sure God was our provider.
I have heard stress talked about, as well as read enough books and articles to know I can get stressed out just hearing about it. It is not my goal to stress you out with a lot of scientific facts about stress. My goal in writing this article is that you and I will begin to make some small adjustments to live in such a way that we reduce the level of stress in our lives.
If you want to have less stress, the first thing you might consider doing is taking a look at your schedule.
Let’s be honest. We all struggle with overcrowding our schedules with too much to do. I come to you as one fellow struggler to another and say, how do we deal with this overcrowded schedule?
Proverbs 17:24 talks about what happens in many of our days when it says, an intelligent person aims at wise actions but a fool starts off in many directions. This is what the beginning of many of our days looks like. One cannot aim at two targets at once and expect to hit the mark. But so often we start off in twenty different directions at once and so at the end of the day we have this feeling of how come I could not get it all done. We have so much to do we cannot seem to get anything done.
What is the result of all this busyness in our lives? Ecclesiastes 5:3 says, being too busy gives you nightmares. It has an impact on our lives, an impact on the way that we sleep, an impact on what we are going through. This busyness in our lives is overwhelming and we do not know how to stop or even slow down How do we lessen the stress in our schedules?
Psalm 90:12 is a prayer, "Teach us to make the most of our time that we may grow in wisdom. God, teach me to use my time so that I may grow to be more and more a wise person, the kind of person that You want me to be."
One idea for redeeming the time to have less stress from an already overcrowded schedule: For less stress do not add anything to your schedule without subtracting something from your schedule.
Got it. You do not add anything without intentionally subtracting something from your schedule. If you have 5 things on your list to do today and something else pops up, then subtract the least important thing and put it on tomorrow's list.
I know this is painful for the driven person whose identity is tied to their success and productivity. Trimming a schedule is a difficult thing to do, but you will be so glad you did it. Do it now. Right now, in your mind decide, I am not going to add anything more to my schedule without deciding to subtract something. That one decision will make an incredible impact on our overcrowded lives. Not sure about you but I am still a work in progress. Hope this helps.