If I forget the ultimate, I'll be enslaved to the immediate.

I picked up a quote this week by John Maxwell that goes like this: "If I forget the ultimate, I'll be enslaved to the immediate". The more I think about that statement, the more I see in it. How easy it can become to be so busy with the day to day activities, that we forget the reason why.

Yonggi Cho in his book "The fourth dimension" talks about faith. In the first chapter he writes about the steps toward having faith. The first step, he writes, is to "envision a clear cut objective". Compared with Maxwell's quote above, this would be the "ultimate". Cho suggests that before we can have faith, we need to be clear about what we are having faith for. Jesus asks blind Bartemaeus "What is it you want me to do for you?". We might suggest the answer was obvious, but in the realm of faith, Jesus needed Bartemaeus to be specific.

My question to each one of us is therefore, "What is the ultimate"? What is the "clear cut objective"? What is our true aim in life? What do we really want to do? I think each one of us need a clear answer to this question.

If we don't know, or lose sight of the ultimate, we become enslaved to the immediate. In other words, we will live each day at the mercy of the urgent. We will find ourselves busy with activities that do not necessarily contribute to our ultimate goal in life. We can take opportunities simply "because they are there". When we have a "clear cut objective" we can filter every new opportunity through that ultimate goal, and ask ourselves "will this opportunity be a contributor to a distraction from my ultimate objective".

Of course, being on sabbatical I am in the place where I can re-establish my "ultimate objectives" in life, and review the "activities" I have been enslaved to and ask the question over each one,"Is this contributing to or distracting me from my ultimate objective". The only way we can ask ourselves that question is by knowing what the "ultimate" is.

So what is your "ultimate"?