10 minutes a day

I am rerunning this post from May 5 of this year as part of what I’m calling Challenge Week here. Did I do it? No, that’s why I’m rerunning it here, challenging you and challenging me this week as I rerun several posts this week to help motivate me and also maybe, in turn, help motivate you.

On Sept. 26, 2004, a man named Matthew Kelly came to St. Peter’s Church in Wellsboro, Pennsylvania, where my wife and I are currently members but were not at the time. A videotape was made of the talk and while my wife and I already watched it once this past weekend, I watched it again this morning to take notes so I could share some of what he said with all of you.

“God wants us to live our lives while they’re actually happening. He wants us to wake up.”

This is how Kelly began, and then asked three questions for us to ponder:

1. What do you want?

We want to be happy, he said: physically, emotionally, spiritually and intellectually. Intellectually, if we take 10 minutes a day to read a good book, our world expands, so it is spiritually if we take a few minutes a day to step into what Kelly calls “the classroom of silence”: our world expands.

“We know the things we want to make us happy, but we don’t do those things, because we are too busy.”

Busy doing what? Finding happiness. Or as he says it, “just about everything that means just about nothing to just about nobody just about anywhere and means nothing 100 years from now.”

2. What does God want?

Kelly said most people never ask the question, because they’re too scared of what God wants them to do. But first, what God doesn’t want is the following: to control, to manipulate, forcing you to do anything you don’t want.

What is it then that God does want?

He wants you to become the best version of yourself. That is our central purpose. Everything else makes sense.

Then Kelly asked for people to make a list of friends of who is helping you to become a better version of yourself and which ones are you helping to become a better version of themselves.

3. What do we all want a little bit more of?

One of the great myths of the 20th century is that time is our most valuable resource..time isn’t our most valuable resource. Energy is our most valuable resource.

He also said the things that make you happy and make you a better version of yourself also give you more energy.

Kelly then related how in college, he felt this restlessness within him, which he couldn’t put a finger on. A friend of his family’s was at a party and noticed this restlessness. “Maybe nothing’s wrong, maybe something’s missing,” the man told him. “You need to spend 10 minutes a day in church.”

Kelly told the man he already spent time in church every Sunday. The man said that isn’t what he meant. So over the next few weeks, Kelly began spending 10 minutes a day in church, first telling God what he wanted, then telling God about his problems and finally the question he said that changed his life: God, what do you think I should do?

Start with 10 minutes a day. Write down on a piece of paper: ’10 minutes a day’ and put it on your bathroom mirror.’

He then encouraged people to do it for just six weeks to start and added that “lives change when habits change.” However, he said unfortunately for 90 percent of the people that were there that evening back in September 2004, they’d probably say that they didn’t have to write it down, that they’d remember and then would promptly forget.

So that leaves 25 of 250 people (about the number of people that were at that talk) who would wake up and do it the next day, but then by day 5 would forget it and by the following Monday, 90 percent of the 10 percent would be continuing to do it, or 2.5 people.

With all the crisis in The Church today, he said, the problem isn’t all of what you see on CNN, but that 2.5 people can’t commit to 10 minutes a day.

Lastly, he said what it takes is perseverance and then related the story of Abraham Lincoln, who failed and failed and failed again, even having a nervous breakdown, but still went up to become President.

What are we doing? What does he want? To discover the dream, to become better versions of ourselves. Embrace the dream.

I am. Now will you?