Episode 619

TODAY’S READING

What I don’t understand about myself is that I decide one way, but then I act another, doing things I absolutely despise.

Romans 7:15

We are very comfortable with what we do and how we act, and it’s very hard to change our behaviors. And that’s because it hurts our identity or at the identity level. And so what we need to remember is that God’s sources, our identity, and our identity, is that we are children of God, first and foremost, and that can help us change our behaviors. And so the reason why I label today’s devotional microtransactions is that I believe that every single day we do microtransactions that allow us to become better people. And so the example that I like to use in my personal life is why I started this podcast to begin with. I wanted it to be better about my prayer life. And what I found was that I would make excuses, or I didn’t prioritize, or I wouldn’t segment my time correctly. And so prayer started to become further and further down my list. So the micro transaction in that is that I made it a point to start writing down my prayers, and I started an email chain. And that is what eventually flourished into the podcast. And here we are two years later. So that remains 619 episodes and over 1.3 million downloads globally. And that’s because one day said yes. And the second day said yes, and I never said no, again. That habit took me three months of writing before I could even go into an audio format. So little by little, I transformed my prayer life into something I am now very much in routine with. Now the same can be said with other aspects of our lives. So maybe you are in tune with your prayer life. Maybe you want to prioritize your Health. Well, instead of forcing yourself to go to the gym every day because you’re not currently in that habit. 

We can make it a point to have a micro-transaction of just getting up and walking around the block after each meal, or at least after one meal. And day by day, that microtransaction of walking after a meal becomes or turns into walking after all three meals, and then that turns into walking for an hour. And the walk-in for an hour turns into jogging for an hour, and so on and so forth. And before you know it, when you look back in a year, you have this completely new way of living because of the microtransactions from before, and so that is in the literal sense but the spiritual sense. We sin day in and day out. We are not perfect people. And there might be traits about us that we would love to fix. Maybe we’re prone to gossip, and so the microtransaction, and that is learning to walk away when conversations start to come up. Whatever it is for you. 

I pray that you surrender it to God and you ask him for the tools that you need or for the eyes to be open to the things that you can do day in and day out, small changes that make up large changes in the future. We don’t want to look back at our actions and despise the people we became because of the habits that we were in. We have the opportunity today to change our behaviors, form new habits, and love what we are and who we become because we prioritize not just prayer in our spiritual life, not just Health from our physical life, but also our hobbies and the things that make us happy and bring us joy from the place of our soul. And so all of those things are only possible because of our relationship with God and the way that we steward the things that he’s given us, including our bodies, our minds, and our spirits. And so today, we pray that we start to look at the microtransactions that we do every day and may continue to add positively to our lives and not from a negative place in our lives.

Prayer:

Father God, we thank You, Lord, for this beautiful Thursday. God, today we surrender all of the things that we don’t like that we do or all of the things that we wish we could be. Alright, it all starts with one small step, and so and so you called us to be good stewards of our bodies, Lord. And so today, we put our Health First; we start walking just after every meal, five minutes, maybe 10 minutes just going around the block. And Lord, we want to be good stewards of our minds and our souls. And so we look for places in which we can quiet down and look for your presence. We look for ways in which you bring us joy through the way you’ve created us all individually through hobbies and personality traits that only pertain to us. God will care for our spirits by continuously putting our prayer life first. All of these things are small transactions that we can do on a daily basis that add up to one big large change habit change in our life. We thank you for the opportunity to become better. We thank you for the opportunity to be in the right standing with you, and we thank you for the grace when we fall short of all of that. We thank you for the grace that you show us, and we ask for grace for ourselves when we feel it. We thank you. We love you. We honor you. We pray this all in your mighty Name, Amen.