Mon 5  Feb 2007
Returning to China, Temptation or Call?

Entries like these, shed some light on my thinking at the time:

Tuesday, 06 February 2007

Prayer for improvement

Lord, it is once again just after 05:00 in the morning.  I worked until about
10:00 last night, and Lili continued until about 01:00.  We cannot continue
like this.  I pray that You will help us get our lives under control, and keep it
under control.

Saturday, 10 February 2007

Learning the principles about the things I’m battling with

Currently there are three challenges in my life which I am experiencing
quite vividly.  They are being too busy, being financially overcommitted
and battling to motivate myself to work diligently.  I waste a lot of time when
I become demotivated.  I still do stuff, but I do stuff without focus and
inefficiently.

With wanting to spend more regular time with God, it would probably be a
good idea to break these topics into these times.  So instead of having
one quiet time where I read about everything, I focus one QT on one topic,
and another on the next topic.  That way, I will be more focused on getting
a good understanding of what I am studying, and I can think about it in
between the QT’s.

What was happening here?

So what was happening here, was that I had run all three my primary
resources to their limit.  When we are in a situation where this happens,
that should be a red light flashing that what we need is not a slight
adjustment to the way we work, but a major adjustment to our whole life.

If you are battling in one of these three areas, you can normally do some
adjustment to compensate for it, or learn a new skill here or there to get
better at it. But if you reach the end of all three these resources, you are
in real trouble.  

I failed to realize this at the time, and consequently continually ran on the
very reserves of the three primary resources in life, trying to create coping
mechanisms, instead of noticing and realizing that what I needed, was a
major change to my entire life.
Major Change Needed!