Last night on the way home from community group, Will Poon asked me and John Chan several questions about our personal walks with God and our leadership roles. In short, he pointed out how most of the people he spoke to tried to be leaders first, before they tried to be Christians. Then and there, I felt conviction for the first time in a long time. I still remember Prime Time 4 a couple weeks ago, when David Herling finally brought to light what the phrase “better is one day than thousands elsewhere” meant. If given the choice to spend a day with the Lord, or to spend a thousand days anywhere we wanted to be on this earth, what would the choice be?

I suppose for so long, I’ve gotten used to the idea of being a good leader, before I was a good Christian. It wasn’t something I liked admitting to, but I couldn’t lie. Sometimes when you run on structures and routines, you get caught up in the act of doing things, and you completely miss the heart of it. For me, this conviction is making me re-evaluate the year. In a single moment, I realized I had missed the point of being a leader this entire year. So close, yet so very far. Not to say that I was never intentional about keeping my walk, but it felt easy to compromise my time with God for “the Kingdom’s work”. It was my excuse, a way of justifying the lackadaisical efforts at praying and reading the word. It seems like every year, I try to set out to do daily devos, and every year, I fail. This year, it seems like I’ve failed more than ever. On the one hand, I’ve experienced a lot of personal growth in learning how to trust God and learning how to let go. But in hindsight, those big “growing moments” came the few times when I was reading the Bible.

So it is with a heart of conviction, that I add yet another goal to this summer. There are things that man wishes to do, but there are also things that man needs to do. How do you survive spiritually without consuming your daily bread? How do you maintain a relationship with your Heavenly Father if you don’t even communicate with Him? I know I had wanted to “fast something for a month” this year, but it was not my intention, even if it was subconscious, to deprive myself of spiritual growth. If God’s taught me this much with the minimal praying&reading I’ve done so far, just imagine how much I can learn if I did it daily.