What Matters Most

I recently remembered a time I was sitting with my then two year old grandson, Joel.

I had given him a tiny chalkboard with a little box of chalk. There were maybe six pieces of chalk in the box. When he opened it up and pulled them out, two of the pieces broke and then as he played with them a couple more pieces fell off of those two.  When it was time to put them away, he attempted to put the chalk back in the box but he put the little pieces in first and then the big pieces wouldn’t fit. So I was showing him that if he would put the big pieces in first, then the little pieces could fit around those big pieces and he could get everything in that box that he wanted to.

I was struck by how this same concept plays out in our lives. If we let our lives get filled up with the unimportant, with the many phone calls or emails or things that come our way, without knowing what the big pieces are, what really matters to us, our life gets filled up with a whole lot of little things and then we don’t have room for what’s really important to us.

So today would be a great day to set your priorities. Become independent of busyness and pause to ask - in my life, deep down inside of me, what really matters most.  What are the one or two or three things that if nothing else fits in the box, I want to be sure this gets in the core and center of my life.

From this, issues a whole new kind of life and that truly is a miracle.  The miracle is to be aware and act from the awareness of what matters most.