Have you ever noticed that much of life is made up of small, insignificant events and little choices we make from day to day? The big events and choices are remembered. If you are married, you might remember the day you chose to propose to your wife or you might remember the day your husband proposed to you and you made the decision to say “yes.” That was a big day and a big decision. Maybe you remember the day when you decided what college to attend or what job offer to accept. Again, those are big decisions and big events. I am not sure how many of those kinds of choices we make over the course of a year but I am sure there are many.
Consider, though, the little, seemingly insignificant decisions we make every day. When to get out of bed, what to eat for supper, which streets and highways to take to work, whether or not to send a particular email, what conversations to have or not have. Those kind of decisions fill each of our days to the point they cannot be counted. But those little choices may have a huge effect on our lives.
What would happen if we started paying more attention to those kind of seemingly insignificant choices? What kind of effect would that have on our lives? Say you are struggling with your weight or health and you have not noticed the bad choices you are making every day. Perhaps if you paid more attention you would make the small choice to walk up the stairs instead of taking the elevator? Perhaps you would choose to eat and apple rather than the pastries someone brought to work?
Our problem is that we rarely see any improvement when we begin to make healthier, holier choices. We are an impatient people. We know what we want and we want it now. This is true in both our physical health and our spiritual health. Rarely do we find that both hinge on the big events and the big choices of our lives. It’s the small decisions, the small compromises that have a compounding effect on our lives. Perhaps if we paid more attention to the small things, we could find our lives greatly enhanced.
There is no pill we can take that will bring us immediate results in either or physical and spiritual health. But if we pay attention and make incremental improvements in our life, we will find that slowly (at first) things do begin to improve. So start small but be consistent. It really is in the smallest of things, consistently practiced over a long period of time that will bring us better health: spiritual and physical.