Redeeming Productivity: Getting More Done for the Glory of God by Reagan Rose

Author:Reagan Rose [Rose, Reagan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Moody Publishers
Published: 2022-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

6

PRACTICE 3

TRACK YOUR COMMITMENTS

When I was a kid, I had a recurring nightmare. Several times a week, I would have a dream in which a man would be chasing me, and when he caught me, I would be turned into chocolate. Some people may think there’s deep psychological meaning to that dream. I sure hope not, because it was super weird. I’m glad I stopped having that dream, but another recurring dream that I still have to this day is some variation of what we’ll call the “school-mare.” I bet you’ve had some version of this dream before too. It’s finals week and suddenly you realize there’s a class that you had forgotten to attend all semester. You sweat through the exam, knowing you are completely unprepared and are most definitely going to flunk this class. Other versions of this dream include not being able to find your classroom, forgetting your locker combination, or committing the classic blunder of showing up to school without pants on.

While I’ve never heard of someone else having a dream about a man with a milk-chocolate Midas touch, I was relieved to find that school-mares are quite common—even in people who have been out of school for decades. In fact, the school-mare is among the five most common recurring dreams.1 Sometimes called anxiety dreams, dreams like these stick with us even into adulthood because they express some of our deepest fears of embarrassment or failure. We are terrified of being unprepared.

We fear being unprepared because we know the sting of disappointment when we’ve let someone down. We’ve all had real-life experiences of dropping the ball. We’ve promised to do something and either forgotten about it or simply failed to follow through. No one wants the reputation of being undependable. And this urge is related to fruit-bearing.

In the last chapter, we talked about the fruit we’ve been called to bear for God and how it makes up the content of our productivity. Many of those good works, however, aren’t just one-off acts. The fruit of a faithful Christian life shows up in the normal commitments we make to ourselves and others. We commit to do our jobs well, commit to serve in our churches, and commit to responsibilities in our homes. Being faithful in fruit-bearing, therefore, requires us to be faithful to our commitments. We want to be the kind of people who keep our commitments, but these days managing your commitments is harder than ever, for several reasons.

First, the world is increasingly complex. The sheer number of demands placed on us today is certainly unparalleled in human history. We can’t possibly keep track of all the promises we’ve made in our heads while also fielding the bombardment of distractions vying for our already-divided attention. Yet that’s exactly what we try to do. Someone at church asks you to do something. You say yes then promptly forget all about it. Your boss asks if you have the bandwidth to take on another project. You say yes,

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