Worth the Fight...

Have you ever stopped to consider where you expend all of your emotional energy each day? There is tired from just keeping too busy, but there is also a type of tired that results from expending our emotional energy. How many times a day does your blood pressure rise?I consider myself a pretty level headed person, but I still find myself frustrated at the slow driver in front of me, the fact that I have to ask my children to do something three times before they respond over their loud music, or that we overspent our food budget. I can type that list very calmly, yet in the moment even just knowing that I am late can make me want to implode. Take it to the next level; think about the amount of energy we spend wringing our hands about things we cannot even control.I would like to think that we are each given a certain amount of energy each day. It is my choice how I spend that energy. Do I waste it or measure it carefully? As I recently contemplated this analogy, a question kept surfacing in my mind: What is Really Worth Fighting for?Even if I stuff the expression of my frustration when the ketchup spills on the day I finally mop the floor, I can just imagine that energy escaping into the darkness. I just came from a high school basketball game. Some of the parents and players were ready to take it to the parking lot over a ball going through one net more than another, really?I would propose that we spend a lot of our daily energy fighting for the wrong things. We fight for earning power. We fight for a sense of achievement. We fight for control. We fight for attention. What if we decided to only fight for the health of our relationships? Can you imagine how our daily life would change if we didn’t fight with the people we know and love, but we fought for them?Think about your relationship with the Lord. If someone is even spending daily time with the Lord, how hard do they fight to protect it? We would not dare miss dinner out with a friend, but the slightest shift in our schedule and we just skip our time with the Lord all together. Whether is be your relationship with the Lord, your child, your mom, or your husband, what if you decided that your biological family, your spiritual family, and your friends would be the beneficiary of your energy? There are not many things worth fighting for, but when our days on this earth are over we will never regret fighting to protect our time with the Lord each day or the opportunities to make memories and make a difference with those we love. Don’t waste the energy God has given you on the trivial. Let’s fight for what truly matters.