"How do you see God?"

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What’s God look like to you? Maybe for you God looks like a piñata. You’re looking for just the right prayer stick—solid and the right length—to whack God hard enough to force the goodies you want to rain down from the heavens.

Or maybe for you, God is more like a prize machine, you know the kind where you drop your money down, grip the joystick, maneuver the claw over what you want from life, then drop and grab it, move carefully over to the chute and let it go.

Or, maybe for you, God looks more like a craps table. You try to be good enough to buy up enough chips to bet your life, pick up your dice, blow on them, breathe a prayer to God like "Come on now, the baby needs shoes!" and roll away.

Look, there are no magic words when it comes to praying to God. Sure, use words to pray, but prayer is more about a relationship with God than a piñata or claw or roll of the dice. Just talk to God about what’s on your mind and heart, about what’s in your spirit. Then listen to life and make a life, not just a living.

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"Is there a purpose for every season?"

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Have you noticed with the change of seasons comes less daylight? When I get up in the mornings, it’s dark. There’s just not as much daylight now.

I understand all about the earth’s rotation and the seasons and distance from the sun. But somehow having less daylight affects me. I feel more tired at the end of the day, because it gets dark so much earlier. In the summer, when it’s light until nine some evenings, I go home and work in the yard or cut the grass. I have all kinds of energy. Now it seems like I’m ready for bed by nine.

I guess there’s a rhythm to life, isn’t there? A beat that is fast sometimes and slow others. There’s a purpose to every season. I mean I couldn’t work forever at a summer pace. So maybe the purpose of fall is to slow you down a bit, to get you to back off of the throttle for a while and coast a little more, to help you remember to breathe deeply, to force you to find a lower gear.

Find your rhythm in this season, hopefully a slower pace, and enjoy this season for what it is as you listen to life and make a life, not just a living.

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"What are you afraid of?"

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One of the things I remember from trick-or-treating as a child at Halloween is that my younger brother was scared to death of ghosts. Or, actually other kids dressed as ghosts.

He and I would walk from one neighbor’s house to another and all of a sudden, he would scream and start crying. I would look around and there was a kid dressed as a ghost. I would hug him until "the ghost" walked on by.

He was afraid of ghosts not because they were ghosts but because they were dressed in all white. You see he had surgery a couple of times when he was a baby and later as a preschooler. All of the OR people wore white as did the other nurses and doctors. He associated their white dress and the white sheets of "the ghosts" with pain.

You know, we’ve had a lot of pain in the world this year—war, terrorist attacks, school shootings, genocide.
It’s easy for you to associate that pain with every dark shadow in life and be frightened of lots of things.

Ask God to hug you until your ghosts walk on by as you listen to life and make a life.

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"How much can you eat at one time?"

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What if you tried to sit down at your dinner table and eat enough food to last you all week long? Could you do it?

Let’s say you could. Could you eat enough in that one sitting to last you all month? All year?

Of course not. Just like you can’t eat enough food at one time to last you really more than a day, you literally can’t live your life more than one day at a time.

And on some level, you know that’s true. But think for just a second about how your thoughts run way beyond today. Do you ever worry about something that may happen next week? Next month? Next year? Twenty years from now?

So many people I coach choose to overwhelm themselves by worrying about what will happen in the next week, month, year, or 20 years. They become anxious by living way out of today.

When you feel overwhelmed today, say to yourself, "I’m listening to life today" and remind yourself that you can only eat enough for today.

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"Do you G.I.G.O.?"

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Technology-related professionals talk about an acronym, G.I.G.O. or GIGO. It means, "Garbage In, Garbage Out." They’re referring to the fact that whatever you put in a computer is what you get out of a computer.

You’re kind of like a computer. One way of thinking about the garbage you feed your mind is to evaluate the level of negativity that you expose yourself to.

Take the news for instance. Sure you want to stay informed, but recently for several days I reviewed the kind of stories reported in a typical TV newscast. For the most part, murders, other violent crimes, fires, and other disasters made up the bulk of the newscast. And these types of stories didn’t originate just in the station’s coverage area with up to one-half of the stories from out of state.

Now if you watch the 11 o’clock news, how do you think this negative news affects your mind while you sleep?

Stay informed, but remember—one of the keys to making a life, not just a living is to feed the mind God gave you good stuff, not garbage.

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