. . . and concentrate.
Great advice from Christian writer and speaker Anne Ortlund, who died in November 2013. I’ll be doing a book club post on Disciplines of the Beautiful Woman, her 1977 classic, later on this month.
For now, though, I’ll just concentrate on these three words. You may think, well, easy enough for her to say. What on earth can I eliminate? I’d love to concentrate just on what I love the most, what I feel most called to do, but hey! What am I supposed to do with all this other stuff that’s been thrust upon me?
No easy answers here. I do think, though, that sometimes we take on responsibilities that don’t belong to us. Many years ago I read a statement in a Bible Study Fellowship commentary that would have saved me from some unwise commitments of my own had I followed it. I can’t quote it exactly and can’t remember what we were studying at the time. The general idea, though, was that if you take on something that really should be done by someone else, not only are you overextending yourself and probably therefore shirking your real obligations, but you are crowding out someone else who could and should do that job. Isn’t that an interesting idea? Your overcommitment is someone else’s deprivation.