"Kaizen"

It’s been a busy, bizarre, and hectic couple of weeks, so let me just say “Happy New Year!”

I hope that this Update finds you and everyone you love doing well.  The holidays can really take it out of people -- especially if we throw ourselves into meeting every expectation that everyone has about everything that they assumed needed to be done, and done in particular ways.  The sad thing is that a time of year that’s supposed to draw us into celebration and joy about God’s most amazing intervention in the history of the world can often be a time of stress and disappointment for people.  I’m pretty sure that we do ourselves a disservice when we focus more on the trappings of Christmas than we do on celebrating the coming of Christ.

So let me encourage you -- encourage all of us -- to start the New Year off with a renewed commitment to consciously placing Christ first and foremost, in the center of our priorities and plans.  By that, I don’t mean that we should just try to be more churchy or to do more Christian-y things, but rather that we should try -- in everything that we do -- to make sure that we are actually, actively, consciously honoring Christ in our hearts, in our words, in our actions, and in our purposes.

Okay, that sounds like it’s a huge commitment to make (and, on some levels, I suppose that it is), but that really doesn’t have to be one big bite to try to chew all at once.  It’s not like we have to go from being broken and struggling in 2019 to being perfect in 2020 in one fell swoop.

Maybe we should take a lesson from Japanese business theory (well, it’s actually American business theory that we imported to Japan after World War II, but let’s not get sidetracked here), and follow the practice of “kaizen” -- of committing ourselves to simple, small, manageable improvements every day.  For instance, though there are some things like quitting smoking that you really have to do 100% or else it’s kind of pointless, an amazing amount of improvements can be done more incrementally.  You may think that a massive Spring Cleaning of your home sounds daunting, but you could at least just change that burnt-out lightbulb today, couldn’t you?  Or you could commit to cleaning up that storage room this week, couldn’t you?

In the same way, maybe we could commit to working on our relationships just a little bit more this week -- to biting our lip the next time an argument seems to be brewing, or to calling that person whom we keep meaning to call, or to consciously use more encouraging words and fewer negative ones.

Or we could commit to working on our relationships with the Lord just a little bit more actively.  If you don’t pray much, then why not pray just a smidgey bit every day?  If you don’t read your Bible, then why not spend five minutes and read a quick chapter or a Psalm every day?  If you’ve been meaning to try out a Small Group Bible Study at church, then why not just try one out this month?

Can you commit to improving 1% -- just a smidgey bit -- in some aspect of life today, as an act of ascribing worth to what’s worthwhile to God?  To push that broom at work, or to connect with that family member, or to spend a more genuine moment with God, with 1% more conscious desire to honor God with what you’re doing in life?

Hint: if you aim for 1%, you may accidentally hit 2-3%, but that’s okay.  I’m sure that God won’t mind...