Tonight I am sitting in a motel room wrapping up a week’s vacation spent with my daughter and her family.  It’s been a great week. 

As I reflect over these last few days and the priceless memories that were created I couldn’t help but remember a statement I put to memory many years ago.   

It was over twenty-years ago when I first heard John Maxwell say, “If you keep doing the things you need to do when you need to do them, the time will come when you can do the things you want to do when you want to do them.” 

There were many hard days that I doubted those words.  But tonight I am happy to report that I have found that to be true.   

Every day is an opportunity for you to make a deposit in your future.  Every day there are things that need to be done and most of the time they are things you don’t particularly want to do.  But if you will keep at it—giving what you do your best—signing your name to everything you do as a reflection on you; I promise, there will indeed come a day when you will begin to find yourself doing more and more of the things you want to do when you want to do them. 

Life will always have necessary chores and duties.  But faithfulness in those things has a way of setting you up for an abundant harvest of wonderful opportunities and priceless memories. 

• The ONE THING for today: What you need to do today is about far more than today. 

A precious memory that I would have never dreamed possible back in those days when Sonja was working at the “shirt factory” and I was a bagboy at a local grocer while trying to learn how to be a pastor.