Stick with the program

Several of you have written and told me that you have taken my numerous suggestions of late and have set goals for yourself this year and I applaud you for your effort. You should be aware that as you try to achieve them, satan will not want you to succeed and like a radical Muslim terrorist will set roadside bombs and snipe at you every step of the way.

In order to succeed and accomplish your goals you must fight through his constant attacks and diligently work on your goals even when you are dead tired, grouchy, sick, disgusted, discouraged, and distraught.

I had this conversation with one of my employees yesterday. His problem is staying on track. He knows what he needs to do and has often set goals in writing, but sometimes gets worn down by the above, or distracted, or lazy, or a combo and is deterred from success.

As evidence that this satan phenomenon is real, the Bible states that we are engaged in spiritual warfare and that we must remain diligent because our adversary the devil is stalking around like a roaring lion seeking to rip us apart. According to the Bible he is a powerful supernatural adversary and we must work hard using all of the skills and tools that God has given us including Bible study, prayer, and fellowship with other Christians to win the war.

The bottom line concerning achieving our goals is that satan is the author of discouragement and does not want us to succeed and will fight as hard as he can to ensure that we fail and do not achieve our worthwhile goals.

The next step to setting goals is of course to diligently pursue them on a daily basis and achieve them. It is easy to do this when one feels great and is highly motivated, but what about all of those times when we don’t feel so great and our motivation is distant?

The person who gorged their way through the holidays and is determined to shed those pounds of blubber by dieting and exercising will generally start out motivated and be genuinely determined to be able to walk again instead of waddle, only to find in a few weeks that in a moment of weakness they backslide and end up ditching their worthwhile goals and diet, and in so doing, delight their adversary satan who wants them to fail.

I am not exempt to this myself. My wife has a cold and last night snored all night. The sound of it through her stopped-up nose and raspy voice was eerie and I feel like an aborigine who lost his dream world because she was honking on a darned didgeridoo all night. I have trouble sleeping anyway and am such a light sleeper I can be awakened by a moth coughing. She on the other hand can sleep in a comatose type deep sleep through a hurricane.

Do you think I’m kidding? She slept through Hurricane Katrina as it began to build off Key West sending band after intense band of nightmarish hurricane force winds through Islamorada. The wind was blowing rain horizontally, debris was flying through the air and I was running wild eyed from window to window watching the spectacle of a lifetime while she lay in the hall on a pallet of bedding and calmly slept through the hurricane of a century.

But I’m getting distracted.

Today I’m tired, I’m grouchy, I’m disgusted, and I’m distraught, because I have not had any sleep. I don’t need but maybe three or four hours of uninterrupted sleep at most, but I did not even get that. As a result, when I finally gave up and just went ahead and got up, I did not feel like writing WFTD today. But I forced myself to do it anyway because I knew that this is merely my ongoing battle with satan and he is attacking me through my wife’s cold induced snoring like a chain saw with a faulty muffler all night long becaue he does not want me to achieve my goal.

I am determined not to allow it to get me down. I’m sure when my wife gets around to reading this, my day will not get any better, but hey, at least I accomplished my goal of being faithful and writing WFTD in spite of problems. Achieving goals is dependent upon working through our bad moods, being tired, grouched up days, make no mistake about it. So “man up” and go out there and do it!

Please no letters telling me how bad this column is today, I have suffered enough to achieve this goal I’m leaving for the Florida Keys and warmer weather in an hour or so anyway and I will likely not want to read your e-mail on my Blackberry because my wife will no doubt be harassing me and I don’t need more discouragement today.

Proverbs 29:20
Do you see a man hasty in his words?
There is more hope for a fool than him.