Much has been written on keeping our priorities straight. However, it seems we (especially me) are not getting the message.

I speak to people almost daily who are struggling to juggle their priorities and, typically, what I find is that the wrong ones are winning out.

This is true in my own life as I continually get my priorities completely upside down. I find that my focus is typically on the imminent not the important.

Now, this can be within a sphere of my life or can be pervasive across the various spheres of my life.

We typically only have a few spheres in life; work sphere, health sphere, family sphere, friend sphere, hobby sphere. You may, like myself, also have a spiritual sphere or a vocational sphere. In my case my vocational sphere melds into my other spheres in many ways as I expect yours do too more than you know.

Each of these weigh upon our minds and our souls creating pressure when we have them misaligned. Creating stress and tension…and doing something else that is far more harmful and far less recognized.

When your alignment gets out of whack and you start subjugating the important to the imminent many things begin to suffer. We often become fixated on one aspect while losing perspective on another, lose traction there and things start going south quickly. This can spiral into a loss of confidence in one or more areas of our lives and we suddenly find ourselves completely out of sorts across the board.

Now I am not going to try to presuppose what your priorities should be. You must be the ruler of this aspect.

However, when mine are not aligned with Spiritual first, health & family next then work I begin to lose my way and things begin to go awry.

I was reminded of this recently when I began to lose confidence in a number of areas of my life. A good friend asked me where I was spending my time. At work! I blurted. “And there’s your problem”, he knew I was spending too much time there, everything else in my life was suffering to the all powerful work god. For me, this meant the little god was taking president over the big God.

Furthermore, it meant that all my relationships were suffering as well as my health. It also meant I was losing traction at work. You see, when these other things that we hold most dear begin to lose focus we lose focus even upon the thing we think we is currently most important. It too suffers because our priorities are out of alignment and it impacts every facet of our lives.

I hold my spiritual life above all else but it is the first to suffer when I get too busy. The time I need, desperately, to align myself each morning quietly reflecting gets limited or missed. The time I typically take to plug into my higher power, that which fuels my life, gets unplugged and I begin to run down.

Focus, direction, power all wain and things begin to grind to a halt. No matter how hard I am working to “make it right!”

I urge you to consider your spheres, priorities and alignment. Make the first things first and you will find that the other things will fall properly into line. Additionally, you will find that those things that may be second or third work so much better when the first things are first.