Intentional living is a learning process and this week events in my life have interwoven to prove it.

All of us travel our own road and all too often we allow ourselves to feel as if we have to stay on that road, with no real control over where it takes us.

I’m currently participating in a neighborhood book study (Having a Mary Heart in a Martha World) and this week one of our chapters is about worry and the ways it debilitates our days.  I come from a family of champion worriers and have had to work hard to eliminate it in my life.  It’s not been an easy task but prayer has helped, along with the realization, reinforced in this week’s reading, that we simply have no control over certain things and if we have no control, then worrying about them has no purpose other than robbing us of joy.  In the end, we need to walk around our worry, look at it from all angles and perspectives, and decide if we can act or if we simply need to pray, trust, and then let it go.

Dovetailing perfectly with this was being chosen to be part of the launch team for a book called Undone by Michele Cushatt.  As her book is being published, Michele, a motivational speaker,  is undergoing treatment for cancer and has reached out into the virtual world to review and promote her book.  I’m only a few chapters in but already I’m aware that it will permanently change and shift the way I’ll approach any future challenges in my life.

Perspective is important.  When I’m in the middle of a difficult situation it appears to me in the form of this chair.

It’s either in my way and needs to be circumvented or it ends up being a stopping place where I sit, unmoving, unable to get up and move forward.

If I force myself to get up and look at the chair from a new perspective, if I change the scale of my situation when compared to and set against the scale of what Michele Cushatt has encountered in her life, and the grace and faith she has found in the midst of it, I suddenly see my circumstances from a new perspective and the chair simply becomes part of the design of my life.  Tiny in comparison to God’s plan for me and more importantly, part of my design, to be owned and acknowledged and either overcome or assimilated and then used for good, as opposed to something which continues to consume me with worry.

Every single day I have to remind myself that worry has no purpose.  Every single day I remind myself to be thankful for people like Michele who offer me a new perspective.  Every single day I try to be just a little more intentional.

And every single day I choose which road to take.