Win the Day: 7 Daily Habits . . . (Multnomah, 2020)
Win the Day: 7 Daily Habit to Help You Stress Less & Accomplish More is Mark Batterson’s latest book. Mark continues to serve as lead pastor of National Community Church in Washington, DC. In the Introduction, Pastor Batterson underscores that everything in your past serves as preparation for something in your future. Most significantly, God never wastes days – especially bad days! Therefore, your future is right here, right now (aka the eternal now). Furthermore, identifying life’s subplots provides one key to helping you flip the script. Also, you flip the script when you set God-sized goals that stretch your faith. Yet, Mark defines success as the product of well-managed failure, while strength is the result of well-managed weakness. Therefore, God want to use you at your point of greatest giftedness. But He also desires to use you at your point of greatest weakness.
However, what we perceive as isolated incidents often prove to be inciting incidents that prepare us for future opportunities. As a result, when you lean in and learn to kiss the wave, you emerge stronger, kinder, and wiser. Certainly, the process isn’t easy or painless. But kissing the wave acknowledges that pain is what it is. Thus, you own what happened without letting the pain own your emotions. Above all, don’t confuse self-sufficiency with spiritual maturity. God’s grace supplies the only self-sufficiency you need. Also, you must give dead yesterdays a proper burial before flipping the page on the past. And eat the frog rituals eliminate excuses and, more specifically, the option of opting out. Those daily rituals maximize your God-given potential and save time/energy by streamlining your life. That, in turn, helps you make, rather than find, holy moments within hurried minutes.
Our job, therefore, is to consecrate ourselves to God; doing the little things like they’re big things – fly the kite. To win the day and make it a masterpiece, recognize each day as a miracle. For the best decision you make for yourself involves making decisions against yourself. Because you receive a far greater payoff than the sacrifices you’ve made. Embrace desirable difficulty as a gift from God. Set stretch goals. In addition, Mark stresses, it’s not safe to play it safe. Therefore, to cut the rope means taking calculated risks. It also signifies the way we cut the ribbon on the dreams God’s given us. And when you feel like you’re in the wrong place at the wrong time, God often has you right where He wants you.
Finally, we need to imagine, rather than worry about, unborn tomorrows. So when we wind the clock, that makes the most of every minute, but also of every moment. It also recognizes every moment as a gift from God. Imagining unborn tomorrows means plodding one day at a time. Putting one foot in front of the other, even when you don’t feel like it. Moments arise when you need to seed the clouds with contending prayer. Seeding clouds describes the sacred awareness that all you’ve got is this moment – right here, right now. As Mark exhorts, stress less and accomplish more. Go win the day!
