I wanted to share with you one of my very favorite books. It is the book that hands down has had the most impact on my life as a Christian and the one that I come back to time and time again when I really need to refocus, re-prioritize, and recenter my life and lifestyle. The book is called Disciplines of the Beautiful Woman, written by Anne Ortlund.

My goodness it’s an old book, with a copyright of 1977, but the perspective that this woman has of her life down on earth, her precious years, weeks, days, minutes, moments. She doesn’t waste time. She lives with this incredible sense of purpose. She has incredible drive, but she’s not driven. She is extremely ambitious, but it is completely God-infused. My favorite chapter is chapter 2, entitled Reshaping Your Life to Three Priorities. Here is a little snippet:

As you consider your whole lifestyle, you’ve got to think about what your top priorities are going to be, before you decide what time you’re going to get up in the morning… “Seek first His kingdom and his righteousness, and all these [other] things shall be added to you” says the Bible (Matt. 6:33). We’re to be seekers after Jesus, first. Everything else must flow out of the first. And really first! Top of the list in our lives! The old saying of ‘putting first things first’ is not quite good enough. The New Testament makes it evident that the first of which it speaks is a singular and not a plural; ‘putting the first thing first’ would be the only proper statement of the matter…Anything else that might be taken out of ‘all the rest’ and set up as ‘first’ inevitably will result in double mindedness rather than a single focus…” Don’t think of yourself first as a wife or a single person or a mother or a worker in some field; you will some day stand before God all by yourself.