Linear Rankings, Interconnected Spheres, and Reconsidering My Priorities

During my recent foray into my first year of seminary, I've been challenged to reshuffle my schedule, and in doing so, have been reconsidering my priorities. Not questioning them necessarily, but examining if my schedule actually reflects my stated priorities. In other words, does the way I live match up with what I say is important to me? I've had several reflections during this process.

My first observation considers how I think about priorities compared to how I've heard other people talk about it. At camp and Bible College and anywhere else it has come up, they always seem to challenge me to do something like rank my priorities on a list. The expectation is that someone's list would look something like this: 1. God 2. Family/close friends 3. Work and/or school 4. Church/ministry 5. Hobbies and/or social activities. I'm not sure how this is helpful. These things are not equal or directly comparable to each other. For instance, nearly everyone I know devotes the largest portion of their time (not including sleeping) to work/school, number three on the priority list I gave. In comparison, even the person who is most devoted to having a consistent and committed relationship with God will only give a fraction of that amount of time to regular Bible-reading and prayer time or the like. (I'm not saying, by the way, that it isn't useful to have a method of resolving conflicting priorities in such a way that keeps one truly committed to the most important things in his life, i.e. the husband getting off work early to have a date night with his wife one night a week or the father clearing his schedule to watch his son's baseball game.)

I think it is more helpful to abandon strict linear thinking (just look on any major sports website to see how prevalent our culture's obsession with numbers, categorization, stats, and rankings has become) and imagine a different mental exercise. A piece of paper or a whiteboard are both good images. I write God in the center and put a circle around his name. I then start writing other priorities around the middle, leaving space in between. Some circles are bigger, and some are smaller, which for me is determined by some combination of importance to me personally, and the time and focus required for them. What I get is a bunch of interconnected, and potentially overlapping, spheres. Here are some personal examples of what this exercise allows:

• My part-time job in the mornings can be in the sphere titled "Work", but riding my bike to said job can be in the sphere titled "hobbies" or "health"; I can then draw a line connecting "morning job" to "biking". This flexibility and interconnectedness is completely lost in a linear system.
• I don't have to rank activities like prayer and Bible-reading, but they can be of equal importance with their roles represented by their place in the spheres; for me, prayer might be connected to "God", "Bible", "reading books", "biking", "church", etc.
• Blogging (which I talked about on my other blog today) is an activity that bridges my relationship with God with my hobbies, my thought life, my reading, and whatever else I happen to be inspired to write about.

My other observation is what I learned from doing the previous exercise: That my relationship with God should be the center around which my life revolves. Every activity I do must fulfill in some way my stated intention to love and glorify God in my life and accomplish his mission for me. Every activity must be connected to the center. This doesn't have to be interpreted strictly, or overspiritualized. Rather, I've begun to realize the value of things like hanging out with people everyday, like hobbies that help me have a richer life, and perhaps above all, knowing that God is ready and waiting to show up in the mundane, the ordinary, the everyday of my life. God doesn't need me to schedule events or time with Him so He can show up. He just wants to fully be a part of everything I already do.