Win the Moment… Win the Day!

Did you know that by the time you are full of anxiety and fear; when you feel like something is wrong and you can’t seem to get it straight; when you feel out of sorts and disconnected, confused, bamboozled, lost, defeated, chances are you have been losing the day, day after day! It happens to all of us at times. We get distracted by the world and all of the things that assault and perplex our minds. We get overly focused on our future and perpetually dragged back to our past. We have failed to live in the moment and win the moment. We have failed to win the day.

Your mind was designed to function within a 24 hour period. The great processor, your brain, was built to handle all of the demands of the day. It was never intended that you would tax your brain cells to decipher and figure out a future you could not possibly discern, nor waste its resources on a past you can neither change nor modify nor improve. Instead, you function best devoting your full attention to the moment at hand. The moment at hand is always something you can handle. Otherwise, you quickly find yourself losing track of the moments, rapidly forging ahead when you needed to slow down. It is in the moment that negative thoughts hit your awareness and it is in the moment that you must handle the challenges with which you are presented. Anxiety, for example, is simply misplaced fears that whittle and carve their way into your thinking. Once misplaced, they surface as feelings of fear that you can no longer put your finger on, much less address! Confusion and feeling lost don’t happen today, but during a hundred yesterdays you failed to recognize appropriately. Feeling out of sorts and disconnected doesn’t just fall upon you suddenly, but develops slowly, imperceptibly over time with one misconnection following another. The reason you cannot get something straight is because by the time you are experiencing the dilemma, its cause has long since hidden itself. You cannot track backwards and solve your issues. You solve your issues by winning the day.

The source of your troubles works in secret. The less you know about your opponent, the better success your opponent enjoys. Every thought stone you leave unturned turns again to rend you. Your opposition works by distraction; by overloading your awareness with worries over the future and regrets about your past. Your enemy convinces you to let things go you should not let go and instead focus on things that do not really matter. Your opposer cooks up a gigantic spaghetti bowl of confusing and distracting thoughts which when completed leaves you wading through the noodles, in vain searching for solutions you are long past obtaining. They count on your lack of attention and sneak in again and again until they render you defeated. You will never find them in the collective, but only in the singular. Alone they can be overcome, but fortified in your awareness they gain strength. The intensity of the contest demands your full awareness; your full attention. And your full attention is found only in the moment in which you find yourself. You need to win the moment.

You learn to win the day by learning to win the moment. What negativity or threat just hit your mind? What prediction of doom or future danger just took a swipe at you? What accusation about who you are; the motives you have; who you really are as a person, just took aim at your heart? When you live, as best you can, in the moment, you are much more likely to see what just happened to you. And, in seeing and hearing, there is something you can do about it. Like any good fight, you have to learn to fight back. Just as you would not tolerate (for long) someone punching you repeatedly, in the contest you have to fight back. Sure you don’t feel like it, but it doesn’t matter as long as you are getting hit. Yes, you can lament and wish it wasn’t this way, but it is this way at least as long as there is evil in the world. So you fight, in that very moment. You confront the wrong thoughts. You challenge them. You take a stand against them. In fact (or better in truth), you fight back until it they shut up. You are in a spiritual fight so you don’t try to fight with your human logic or by being rational. You fight by countering the negatives with the positives of God’s Word. Don’t try to be so smart! What does God’s Word say that counters the evil consideration? Say that! If your opponent threatens your health (i.e. Corona Virus), you counter by proclaiming God’s promise to keep you healthy or forever heal you when you need it. Somewhere in that Good Book, God says often fear not; be anxious for nothing; you are not wrong and He will make all of your paths straight. He says you are always connected; have the answers you need; have been found when you were lost; are not confused and definitely have not been defeated as He always causes you to win! It’s all in there folks and is the perfect answer to every challenge you will ever be confronted with!

Learn to slow down a little and live in the moment. Take on the obvious challenges of the moment. Deal with what is standing right in front of you. Recognize what is traveling through your mind in the moment and decide whether it can stay or it can go. Take it on in the moment! And, as you win the moment, you decide to win the next moment and the next and the next. Pretty soon, you find yourself able to win the day! Tomorrow is tomorrow and yesterday is yesterday. No matter what happened or where you may have fallen short, win the next moment. Soon, you enter the realm of the kick-ass human that God always intended for you to be.

Don’t you want to win the day? I know I do!

Just some good thoughts…