Goals and objectives

This month has been fun for me as I've been trying over the course of the past week to narrow down what my goals for the year should be.

As many of you know, I LOVE the Mahaneys, and so I visited the Girltalk.blogs.com and printed off some of their resources from the beginning of the year regarding goal setting.

The issue they really encouraged their readers to grapple with was - are our goals "self-exalting" or "God glorifying"? I love this quote, "If 'good looks' or any other goal is driven by selfishness, or a desperate grasp for glory and attention, we are merely resolving to sin against God. If James 4:6, 'God opposes the proud' means what it says (and Scripture always does), than God is actually opposing our efforts instead of blessing them."

Of course the opposite is true because James 4:6 continues to say that "'[He] gives grace to the humble.' If we depend upon God to do good works and perfect our character in order to reflect His glory, we can anticipate His grace to blow life into our feeble efforts."

While I've really had to study and grapple with my motives and goals, what a refreshing truth it is that when we depend on God and are setting goals in order to help us glorify Him more He is our biggest help and biggest fan. I haven't finalized all my goals because my heart is taking me a while to ascertain :), but while I'm in the process, I'll share with you a goal a friend of mine helped me with in college that I've found worthy enough to continue all my days...

SCRIPTURE MEMORIZATION!

Here is the key she gave me to really memorize verses FOR LIFE, and I love it, so I thought I'd pass it on (and as Anne Rheney says, "repetition, repetition, repetition").

1) Pick the passage you want to memorize and write it down
2) Say it 25x the first day, 20x the second, 15x the third, 10x the fourth, and 5x the fifth day while looking at the verse as little as possible
3) Then say it everyday for 25 days
4) Then say it only once a week for 7 weeks
5) Finally, repeat monthly

This means a lot of time has to be put in, but I generally use my time while driving to work or while taking walks or on the elliptical machine.

Also, I write mine on index cards and keep them in this handy dandy index card organizer from Office Depot hat is like a 3x5 fabric pocket organizer that has multiple sections in it. That way I can keep the ones I'm saying tons of time a day in one section, the once a day verses in another section, the once a week ones in another section, and over course the once a month ones in another section. Go office depot! (I'm sure you can find similar ones at Wal-Mart, etc).

Feel free to ask me what verse I'm working on to keep me accountable. I need it! :)