I live in an area in which cotton farming is a multi-million-dollar enterprise. Care to hazard a guess about how much time the farmers here spend stripping or picking cotton?
About two weeks.
Everything that determines their futures for another year comes down to a two-week process. And yet, it’s what they do during the other 50 weeks of the year that will make or break the success of their harvest.
It’s all about the cycle, and where they are on it.
You may not be a farmer, but you were created to be a harvester of sorts. God created you with the capacity to envision a better future and a rewarding eternal state. But in most worthwhile pursuits, you don’t have the luxury of microwaving your results in a matter of minutes. While his medals were earned in a matter of seconds, Michael Phelps didn’t jump into a pool for the first time in June. His victories were the crowning achievement of his training cycle.
We, too, experience life in a variety of cycles. The seasons, economic cycles, and generational cycles come to mind. LifeVesting is no different. Each of the Laws of LifeVesting operate on cycles of continuous movement.
Don’t think of these as a locked-in sequence of steps; life is wonderfully much messier than that. Instead, think of the LifeVesting cycle as a flow of activity, moving from one stage to another. Over the next few days, I’d like to explore these with you.
Stage 1: Allocate your resources.
You can’t plant if you don’t have any seeds. You can’t invest if you’ve squandered all your resources. I wonder how many people are kicking themselves these days because they didn’t have any money to invest a few years ago in oil or gold?
Allocating resources is one of the discipline stages of LifeVesting. George Clason’s classic, The Richest Man in Babylon, revolves around the simple discipline, “A portion of all I earn is mine to keep.”
I would modify that to say, A portion of all you receive is yours to multiply. But you have to choose to do it. If you spend all your energy, relationships, time, or money on yesterday (what you owe) and today (what you consume), you are sabotaging your future.
LifeVestors consider such questions as, What do I want to be remembered for? What kind of life do I want to have at age 50, or 65? They then begin channeling their resources toward making it happen.
The great news about LifeVesting is that you don’t have to start with an abundance – just a little, with time, consistency, and action. What you do have to have is some sort of plan. Plans can be tweaked and adjusted – but you have to start somewhere.
Christians live in two worlds. We occupy space in one, and are citizens of another. Here, based on Jesus’ words in Matthew 6:19-34, is a tool that helps me allocate my resources to build a P.L.A.N. for either.
P – Personal commitment
Jesus encourages His followers to personally commit themselves to guard what they “store up” in terms of values and rewards. Also, what they “take in” in terms of how they choose to perceive the world around them. Personal commitment demands that we pay attention to who or what we serve, since no one can serve two masters. Motives and goals also matter. What comes first? Jesus said if we commit ourselves to His kingdom and righteousness, the other things will fall into place.
L – Lifestyle change
To redirect our futures, we must pay special attention to our lifestyles. Jesus specifically identified four habits to change:
- The consumer habit – stop wasting your life on eroding values
- The gambler habit – stop choosing spiritual bondage
- The pleaser habit – stop trying to please everybody else
- The hoarder habit – stop worrying about tomorrow.
A – Action
Allocating our resources is not passive. It involves deliberate action. In thinking of creating “next year’s harvest,” Jesus mentions three different things we can focus on:
- Give – focus on what you will have to offer.
- Serve – focus on who you will have to offer it to.
- Act – focus on what you can to today.
N – New Values
Safe to say, consumers and hoarders operate with a different set of values than LifeVestors. So what does Jesus suggest should drive our values? Start with eternity. Again, the principle of eternity states that the choices we make today will influence our eternal state. And eternity is a long, long time!
Other people should also be an integral part of our values. How can we serve? How can we contribute? How can we make a difference in someone else’s life?
Finally, this mysterious thing called the Kingdom of God. A lot of people debate and discuss what this means; so be it. I would suggest that the greatest thing about the Kingdom of God is that God is the King!
Okay, time to do some allocating. What ideas do you have for setting aside time, money, influence, or something else in order to create value for the future or eternity? (Example: In the middle of a very busy and off-schedule week, I took an hour to visit with a wonderful, open-hearted Jewish lady about the claims of Jesus to be her Messiah. There were a dozen other consumer-type things that could have occupied that time. But the LifeVesting opportunity was awesome.)
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