Day 17 - REFLECTION DAY
Day 17: REFLECTION DAY
Today’s Big Idea: Looking Back to Move Forward
Remember how you felt on the First day of this challenge? Many were excited to start something new and have an end goal in mind. Well, at about this time in many people’s striving to continue with a commitment, it gets a little hard. It gets easier to detach or forget WHY you began this challenge in the first place. Today’s exercise is to think back a few weeks to how you felt and what you thought about before this entire process began. I know, it seems like this should have been done on Day One, or even earlier. But if we had taken too much time to consider our feelings before considering the purpose, it would have been hard, if not impossible, for our feelings not to become our priority.
This process is not about feeling better, it is about becoming better and moving closer to Zero so you can grow. The Hebrews in the Old Testament faced the same thing.
Key Verse: Deuteronomy 5:15
Passage of the day: Deuteronomy 5
Thoughts to consider: After God brought the Hebrews out of slavery, He met with Moses to give him the Ten Commandments. One of those commandments was to take a Sabbath-day rest. Imagine how that felt to people who had spent four hundred years in slavery when one of God’s top ten rules was “Take a day off!” But note that in the explanation for this command God tells them that one of the ways to use that day was to remember where they had come from—specifically, to remember their former slavery. This command is repeated regularly throughout the Old Testament, but this is first time, and it came just a few months after their release from bondage.
God knew they needed to remember where they had been so they could appreciate where they were going. This is why we need to take a few moments doing the same thing right now: remembering where we were. Even if it doesn’t feel like we’re free yet (the Hebrews were a long way from the Promised Land at this point), it’s never too early to remember where we we are coming from.
