A couple weeks ago my buddy, Tony Myles, asked me to write up a description of my daily routine — my “daily grind,” if you will — as an illustration for a sermon at his church. You can listen to his sermon on his church’s website. The message is titled, “Living, Praying, and Talking With Guts,” from July 5, 2009.

Below is what I shared with him.

• Wake up tired because I stayed up too late the night before.
• If time permits, my wife and I pray and read the Bible together (just finished Ezekiel). This ends up happening anywhere from 1 to 3 times a week.
• Head off to the church office where I try to prioritize my time. I’m usually multitasking several things at once, so I almost never eat lunch because I don’t want to interrupt “the groove.”
• Around 2 PM I start getting frustrated that I’m still in the office because I want to use the summer months to hang out with teens, but there’s always so much else to do. Sometimes I drop it all and go hang out anyway. Other times I keep plowing through to-do lists.
• If I stay in the office for the afternoon, I head home around 4:00 because I’m so hungry and want to see my wife. I go straight to the frig and try not to eat too much so it spoils dinner, but enough to calm my stomach.
• Depending on what night of the week it is, my wife and I go out to a high school small group, have jr. highers at our house, go to birthing classes at the hospital, have youth group parents over for dinner, hang out with kids, or other random youth leader meetings or church meetings. Although it’s a bit unusual, the past two weeks we had only one evening at home alone.
• Around 9:00 or 10:00 PM, my wife and I are finally alone at home and can relax for the rest of the evening. She’s pregnant and usually goes to bed earlier than I want to, so I stay up and enjoy the peace and quiet. I love that time to myself with no interruptions and the freedom to do whatever I want to do, nothing else going on, nowhere I have to be, no one I have to talk to. Because I love it so much, I end up staying up way too late, sometimes to 3:00 AM or later, which makes me tired for the next day again until Fridays and some Saturdays when I can sleep in and catch up on rest.

Can anyone else identify?

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