Intention. It seems like an innocuous word filled with hope doesn’t it? Honestly, it’s a word that gets on my nerves because it is usually preceded by some task that was supposed to be completed but was not. Usually the task or event was not done because something else got in the way. ‘I intended to wash the dishes, but I got caught up in a long telephone call with Aunt Nelly’. I intended to go to church this morning, but I decided to sleep in after a late night of studying’. ‘I intended to finish my homework by the deadline, but I got sidetracked’. Excuses, all excuses. Even if the excuse is a good one, it is still an excuse. And though I believe intentions not followed through are excuses, we will all be found guilty of these in-completes at one time or another through out our lives. The best we can do is to make sure our in-completes become less as we mature.
We can do this by making sure we do not have too much on our plates at any given time. We have to make our no mean no, and our yes mean yes. It takes work, we might lose friends and acquaintances, but we must remember that we only live once and life is short. We cannot afford to get mired in overly long to-do lists and being talked into taking on tasks we have no business saying yes to.
But what if we turned intention on it’s head? What if we decided to live life with intention instead of intending to do things we never get to? What if we chose intention instead of bitterness? I believe, as do most people, that life is about choices. We choose to get out of bed in the morning whether we want to or not. We choose to go to school or work whether we want to or not. We choose joy instead of bitterness. We choose happiness instead of sadness. Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying to pretend we don’t feel a certain way. We are beings with emotions: happiness, sadness, anger, etc. But what we do with those emotions is what is important. As we mature physically, emotionally, and spiritually, we must live with intention.
Life takes us through some very sad places. For many of us life did not turn out the way we expected. Some of have been hit with untimely death, unwanted divorce, a marriage that never happened, or children we never had. For many of us, our hearts have been broken and twisted into unrecognizable forms. Hearts broken into so many pieces we do not believe they will ever be put back together again. But what would happen if we lived with the intention that whether our hearts healed or not, we would be a positive force in our little corner of the world? What if we lived with the intention that our broken hearts would not rule us, but that we would rule that brokenness? What if we realized that the brokenness became less, even if it never completely disappeared? What if we found that in the brokenness we realized our calling, the reason we were put on this earth?
No, the broken heart and broken dreams are definitely not the path we would have chosen, but the fact is it happened. What we do about it is what matters. What if we lived with intention?
