Day 142- Sharpen Your Axe
📖Daily Reading
Ecclesiastes 9-10
🎥 Video
Join me on my morning walk as we rise and shine together by walking through the Bible daily and learn a practical applicable coaching nugget from the ultimate life coach - our creator (whatever that means to you). No judgement zone here, all are welcome, we are all on a spiritual journey because we are after all spiritual beings having a human experience.
📝 Reflection
Ecclesiastes 10:10
Using a dull axe requires great strength, so sharpen your blade. That’s the value of wisdom; it helps you succeed.
Simple but powerful truth, sharpen your axe! Chapter 10 in the NLT version of the Bible that I am reading is titled “The Ironies of Life”. The truth is that wisdom is counter-intuitive often times. Life God’s way is counter to ‘our way’, it doesn’t always make sense to us and often seems paradoxical. Many of us focus on our strength and just trying harder, vs stopping to make sure our ‘tools’ are sharp and help us work smarter.
Abraham Lincoln has a famous quote inspired by this verse “If I only had an hour to chop down a tree, I would spend the first 45 minutes sharpening my axe.” I love how this quote puts this verse into a specific illustration and paints the picture more vividly for us. If you had not heard this quote or verse and you were given the task of cutting down a tree in an hour, would your first instinct be to spend 45 minutes sharpening your axe? Probably not for mose of us. We would pick that axe 🪓 🌲 up and start frantically chopping with all of our strength.
When I read the verse, I could see the wisdom of it. Often my wisdom is in ‘hindsight’. I feel like have 20/20 hindsight wisdom - do you? Now, this is where I think wise Abe helps us bring it into ‘the now’ perspective. He use a time bound example of chopping down a tree with a hour on the clock. What do you do?? Let’s expand out from this and apply this to our lives.
Lets pretend you have 75 years (or 50 adult) yrs to live your life and have an amazing epitaph on your tombstone - a description of your ‘dash’ 🪦 Birthdate - Death Date. How do you spend your ‘dash’ years. How do you sharpen your ‘axe’ or yourself so that you can live your life wisely vs - trying just harder? It is counter intuitive right? We see all that needs to be done and we just get to work, maybe we use some wisdom along the way, but our approach is usually not what Abe or Solomon is recommending.
As we are learning more and more about brain science and habit science we are realizing just how wise this timeless and ancient wisdom is! I was asked myself this morning and began journaling about what things ‘sharpen’ myself. How should I be spending 3/4 of my time and life to maximize my impact for God, vs just trying harder in my own strength? I am not going to share my answers, because I want you to think about this for yourself. We are also so very different and we need to tune into what God has for each us individually. Although, I do thing there are some broad categories or principles to focus on, but the details beyond that need to be personal.
Sharpening a blade is a concept and a process, but there are a few different methods and techniques that get the job done. What are you doing to sharpen your blade? Where can you start? This is a mindset shift for many of us and might take some time to sit with and take stock before we can begin to apply it.
✍🏼Daily Journal Prompt
Lets pretend you have 75 years (or 50 adult) yrs to live your life and have an amazing epitaph on your tombstone - a description of your ‘dash’ 🪦 Birthdate - Death Date. How do you spend your ‘dash’ years. How do you sharpen your ‘axe’ or yourself so that you can live your life wisely vs - trying just harder? It is counter intuitive right?
📖Tomorrows Reading
Ecclesiastes 11-12
Coaching Opportunity
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