Image via WikipediaI was recently having a humorous conversation with a friend of mine who does very little cooking. She was commenting on how often our Sunday School class has activities that involve cooking. This includes everything from get togethers where we all take appetizers to meals that we fix and donate to the local homeless shelter. With tongue in cheek she told me, "I really had to think twice about continuing in the class because of all the cooking requirements. It got so bad, that I went to the pastor for advice and told her I needed counsel on what to do. She said I should just go to the grocery store and get things that were ready made, to which I replied that she really didn't understand... these cooking opportunities involved RECIPES!"While my friend had me cracking up over her cooking dilemma, it occurred to me that we all often have expectations that we are trying to meet that are not in our areas of expertise. Sometimes these are things that life simply demands that we must do whether we like it or not. For instance, every year I must file taxes even though I absolutely hate math and dislike sorting and compiling all the financial information of the previous year. Once it is done, though, I must say I have a great feeling, which is due to understanding my finances and planning for the year ahead more than it is due to actually completing the task.
There are other expectations, much like in my friend's case, that we impose on ourselves that are really unnecessary. I have systematically been trying to eliminate these time wasters from my life. One example is cooking dinner every night. While I actually enjoy cooking, a more time saving way of preparing dinner for my family is to make something in a large quantity that we could eat on several occasions rather than something different every night which results in many uneaten left overs. Another way to eliminate unnecessary time wasters is to evaluate each activity as to it's importance in my daily and yearly goals, rather than automatically responding to the urgent rather than the important. Do I really need to check out what everyone is doing on Facebook right now? Do I really need to read that magazine article before writing my weekly blog? Well, I guess you get the picture. Meeting expectations is important, but we must make sure that the expectations that we are meeting are the right ones for the moment.
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