Sometimes I find such choices hard to make, simply because I like people to approve of me. When a person learns to say no to good things, he runs the risk of making enemies and gaining critics; and who needs more of those? So I find it hard to say no.
I have discovered that most people whose lives are leadership centred face the same challenge. But my father's counsel is foolproof: If we are to command our time, we will have to bite the bullet and say a firm but courteous no to opportunities that are merely good but not best.
Once again that demands, as it did in the ministry of our Lord, a sense of our mission. What are we called to do? What do we do best with our time? What are the necessities without which we cannot get along? Everything else has to be considered negotiable, discretionary, not necessary.
I am drawn to the words C. S. Lewis wrote in Letters to an American Lady about the importance of these choices:
Don't be too easily convinced that God really wants you to do all sorts of work you needn't do. Each must do his duty "in that state of life to which God has called him." Remember that a belief in the virtues of doing for doing's sake is characteristically feminine, characteristically American, and characteristically modern: so that three veils may divide you from the correct view! There can be intemperance in work just as in drink. What feels like zeal may be only fidgets or even the flattering of one's self importance ... By doing what "one's station and its duties" does not demand, one can make oneself less fit for the duties it does demand and so commit some injustice. Just you give Mary a little chance as well as Martha.
Extracted from Gordon Macdonald's Ordering Your Private World.
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