Of Prayer and Paradise Falls

In the movie Up, Carl and Ellie dream of living in South America on the edge of Paradise Falls someday. They realize, being the sensible eight-year-olds that they are, that there are other things that must happen before it becomes a reality, but Paradise Falls is their plan. According to Stephen Covey’s Urgent/Important Matrix, Carl and Ellie’s dream is something of high importance but low urgency. According to the matrix, such dreams often get put on the back-burner because of high importance, high urgency things (like work meetings or hungry family members) that demand our time and attention or they get ignored because of low importance, low urgency things (think Angry Birds) that get our time and attention. Covey’s take on the prioritizing of time is, “Anything less than a conscious commitment to the important is an unconscious commitment to the urgent.”
In chapel this week, I argued that spiritual disciplines like prayer and reading the Bible are in the high importance, low urgency category with Paradise Falls. There is plenty of evidence that such things are worthy of our time and attention, such as Colossians 4:4 that says “Devote yourselves to prayer, being watchful and thankful” and Hebrews 4:12 that describes the Bible: “For the word of God is living and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow.”
But, as I told the students, in the end, there isn’t a Bible following me around waving its pages in my face or a bell dictating that I stop and talk to God. In preparing for chapel, I knew God was speaking to me too about how I spend my time. I challenged the students (and myself and perhaps you) to consciously think about how they would make spiritual disciplines a priority so we don’t get to the end of our days never having gotten to Paradise Falls.