Invest Wisely
Imagine that you have $10,000 to spend immediately on a fabulous shopping spree at your favorite mall. Eagerly, you walk into the first store.
“Eeeeewwwwww! That’s hideous! I don’t want that!” you react to the first lamp you see, a truly grotesque thing. Yet the more you stare at it, the more you analyze and continue to critique it, you find yourself handing over $2,500 and having this dreadful — and overpriced! — lamp delivered to your home.
“Ugh!” If that isn’t the ugliest dress I’ve ever seen!” you shudder as you walk into the next store. But you find yourself staring at it, trying it on, grimacing at it from all angles. And, sure enough, you fork over $3,00 and take home a dress that “nobody would ever want to wear!”
“Gross! Disgusting! Unthinkable!” you groan when you see the completely tasteless sofa in the furniture section. After pondering it for hours, sitting on it, laying on it, and concluding that it’s the most uncomfortable, poorly-designed, and truly unattractive sofa you’ve ever seen, you plunk down your last $4,500 and have it, too, delivered to your home.
And when you arrive home that night, you are aghast to find yourself in a home filled with over-priced ugly furniture and hideous clothes, all of which you can’t stand but which you carefully selected and paid for yourself.
Absurd? Could never happen to you?
Your Most Valuable Currency
Perhaps not in the real of money and material goods. But what about the most valuable “currency” you possess: your thoughts?
When you spend your precious mental energy focused on what you don’t want, don’t like, can’t stand, it is 100% predictable that your life will be filled with these very thing.
Why?
Because what you focus on is what you’re going to get. Intuitively, we know this to be true. And we also know that the more mental energy we invest in something, the larger it grows.
And yet we look around at our lives and wonder why they’re filled with the very things we claim we don’t want, don’t like, and can’t stand.
Invest your priceless thoughts wisely today. Spend your mental energy only on thoughts of value, thoughts worthy of your life’s purpose. Screen everything that goes through your mind through these questions:
- Do I really want to spend myself on this?
- Do I want to take this home and decorate my life with it?
- Does this really fit who I am becoming?
Finally, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure,
whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable,
if anything is excellent or praiseworthy,
think about these things!
Philippians 4:8
