Your Vote, Your Future
The Ballots You Cast Each Day (Motivation Monday #2)
You vote on your future every day.
From the moment that your mind sloughs off the veil of sleep, you face unavoidable choices.
Will I pray or sleep in? Should I eat cereal or eggs? Am I going to run or lift, or skip a workout today? How late will I stay up streaming this trash? Why am I watching trash? Why don’t I read a book instead? When will I start controlling my phone time? The options never stop.
“The plans of the diligent certainly lead to profit,
but anyone who is reckless certainly becomes poor.” Proverbs 21:5 HCSB
With each choice, you vote on:
Your future health and fitness
The vitality and depth of your spiritual walk
A strong or weak moral compass
The strength and passion of your marriage
Your children’s upbringing, examples, and relationships
A family culture
Your scope of knowledge and education
Skills, capabilities, and work prospects
Your personal financial situation
Readiness for a rainy day
A network of friends and colleagues
Your attitude and mindset
Whether you’re learning, adapting, and growing, or coasting and stagnating
In a thousand ways, small and large (but mostly small and unnoticed), you tick boxes about your potential future life.
Even passivity is a vote.
In this light, Al Capone’s quip to “Vote early—and often,”1 can be virtuous. It depends on your choices. Choose wisely.
Which boxes are you ticking today? On which path are your choices sending you?
“Sow a thought and you reap an action; sow an act and you reap a habit; sow a habit and you reap a character; sow a character and you reap a destiny.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson
Cause and effect are not an illusion. God has made a world in which we make choices that matter. And they matter most when they are closest to you.
Some choices will matter in eternity more than they do today.
Of course, you’ll also vote on larger worldly issues. Perhaps, like me, you’ll vote with your feet, moving to a state with more freedom or opportunity. There’s also voting with your dollars, either to ease your conscience or to sway a company’s public stance in a controversy. “No, Disney, I won’t pay you to corrupt my children!”
Remember that your vote is not the only one. In personal or family issues, your vote might count extra, but the further you get from home, the more other people water down your influence. In all circumstances, Heaven has the final say.
This keeps you humble. Or it should.
“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then, is not an act, but a habit.”
–Will Durant, summarizing Aristotle’s ideas in “The Story of Philosophy,” 1926
Events out of your control will occur. Illness, weakness, personal loss—but also economics, politics, disaster, or war.
Then you will have new choices. Whether you will worry or trust God, for instance.
Remember that you only have a small say in big events, like elections. Don’t throw away your vote. But hold those outcomes loosely.
Focus on your circle of impact: your faith, family, work, and community. Those will have a greater effect on your daily experience and the meaning of your life than the machinations of national politics.
Trust God. Work with diligence. Love your family and neighbors. That is where your vote counts greatest, where your efforts most affect your future, and your eternity.
Where do you need to change your votes today?
“Don’t be deceived: God is not mocked. For whatever a man sows he will also reap, because the one who sows to his flesh will reap corruption from the flesh, but the one who sows to the Spirit will reap eternal life from the Spirit. So we must not get tired of doing good, for we will reap at the proper time if we don’t give up. Therefore, as we have opportunity, we must work for the good of all, especially for those who belong to the household of faith.”
Galatians 6:7-10 HCSB
In addition to Imago Dad, Brandon Wilborn writes fantasy with spiritual themes. His current project is a series for young readers about a dog with an imagination that highlights the classic virtues of our Judeo-Christian heritage. But he’s already got a couple of fantasy books and stories available at BrandonWilborn.com
Unclear who said it first, but it may have come from William Hale Thompson, Mayor of Chicago in the early 20th century, and most famously repeated by the gangster, Al Capone.