As I have grown and developed both personally and professionally, I have sought to find a way of classifying the various different spheres of my life and identifying some order of priority as I classify my responsibilities. I have tried asking a series of questions... What are the most important things in life? If I say it is family, then where do I fit in work and leisure? What happens when work comes in conflict with family? Are there times where it is necessary to reverse the priorities?
To begin answering these questions, I developed the idea of the excellent compass. This is a systematic way of viewing all of the different areas of my life from a wholistic perspective so that I can begin harmonizing each sphere into a majestic symphony. And while the excellent compass does a great job of giving the 30,000-foot view of life so that we don't leave out important areas, it doesn't give us a decision tool as we try to make the very granular decisions of what to prioritize and how to execute. For this, I use the 6 F's.
- Faith
- Family
- Fitness
- Freedom
- Friends
- Fulfillment
These represent my order of priorities. They represent what I prioritize as well as a create a pre-planned structure to help as I make decisions about how to spend my time and resources on a daily basis. Over the next several posts we will discuss each of these. For now, let's start with the top priority... Faith.
Faith
The first of the priorities is faith. In order to successfully navigate in life, we need to construct an epistemology; that is an understanding of how we know what we know. Stated differently, whether we realize it or not, we have a worldview. We have a framework for knowing, discovering and understanding truth and the world around us. However, the challenge is that as we dig down through the various layers of our assumptions and beliefs to get to the core, bedrock truths that serve as the foundation of our epistemology we discover that at some level we have built the entire house on faith.
Faith is defined in the New Testament as "The assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen."[i] The dictionary defines faith as "Confidence in a person or thing." And, "Belief that is not based on proof.”[ii] As we dig deeper and deeper into our understanding of truth we come to find that the very foundation is built on faith. We have to accept something on faith in order to build the house of our epistemology.
This doesn't diminish the value of our foundation. As we construct the house of knowledge and beliefs that serve as our worldview, we can and should be checking everything to see if the reality we experience as concordant with our belief systems. But at the core, in order to build the house, I need to take a few things by faith. These foundations are:
1. God exists
2. God created all things
3. God has ordered the world to operate in a certain way
4. God has created and maintains a special relationship with mankind
These core and fundamental beliefs affect everything else. Since God created the world to operate in a certain way, we can reliably then understand the world. This also has bearing on how we ought to behave in the world - morality. The rest of the worldview builds from there.
For me, my faith grounded in the truths of Christianity as expressed in the Bible. Far from being a simple crutch to help traverse life, it serves as the foundational bedrock of my epistemology. The overarching narrative is this. God exists. He created the world for his glory. Man rebelled severing our relationship with God. This relationship is restored through the saving and redeeming work of Jesus.
As a result, I am not the ultimate being, God is. I was not created to live for my own aggrandizement. I live in a world with created order, and I live under authority. This influences all of my priorities and understanding of how this world operates. C.S. Lewis in his book, The Weight of Glory comments this way, "I believe in Christianity as I believe that the Sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else."[iii]
[i] Hebrews 11:1, ESV
[ii] https://www.dictionary.com/browse/faith, Accessed 2024-05-14
[iii] The Weight of Glory, C.S. Lewis p.140
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