Something I try to keep at the forefront of my mind is the question, how can I be living with intention? With my health, finances, relationships, work, faith, and other areas of life, are the actions I am taking now on a trajectory that will likely lead to where I would want to be 5, 10, or even 50 years from now?

In a quote that captures this idea well, Annie Dillard wrote, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”

We can only be in one moment at a time – now – and each moment fills up each day. How we live each day, in turn, fills up how we live our lives. Each present moment, each day, is of significance.

Thinking about how my actions today lead either closer or further from the person I want to be and the life I desire is one of the key thoughts that jolted me into recovery from an eating disorder. Finally realizing that I had a problem, I knew that if I continued to do what I was doing, I would continue to starve, lose weight, never be able to have children, and continue to have mental obsessions surrounding food, preventing me from fully engaging in life. Not the life I wanted to be living when I thought years into the future.

They say that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. Even after I initially “mostly” recovered, for the following 6 years when I didn’t have my period (secondary amenorrhea), I thought that all would turn out fine as I addictively continued to eat not quite enough and to obsessively exercise. I thought my health would magically turn around and that my period would magically come back. It took a hard reckoning to accept that my daily actions were not going to lead to the health and future I desired, and I decided to stop all formal exercise completely (which ended up being for a whole year) and increase my eating to allow my body to heal.

Small, intentional steps in the direction you desire to head have the potential to build greatly over time. This is generally the way to overcoming overwhelming obstacles, such as recovery from an eating disorder, as well as the way to reach any personal goals or vision for your life.

I have seen this type of intentional growth play out in my life a number of times. Other examples that come to mind:

• In starting my blog, with no website or coding experience, I was able to launch this website after over a year of small steps in design and planning.
• In working with Cru after college, I needed to raise over $35,000 to cover my ministry salary and expenses. This happened one phone call and one message to potential supporters at a time.
• In training for a marathon, I was able to go from running several miles at a certain pace to being able to run 26.2 miles at that pace, one run and rest day at a time.

While recovering from an eating disorder, addiction, or other mental health problem is different in a lot of ways from the examples above (due to the mental and biological forces at play), the point here is that each small step, no matter how seemingly small, in the direction you desire has the potential to exponentially multiply over time, leading to lasting healing and change.

What kind of life do you want to be living? What vision do you have for your life? What goals do you have for your future? Are the actions you are taking today generally leading you towards or away from that life?

The reality is that none of us know how many days we will have on this planet, and all of our lives will at some point come to an end. Psalm 90:12 says, “So teach us to number our days so that we may get a heart of wisdom.” Living in awareness of the fact that our days are numbered helps us to live wisely and thus with intention. We only get each moment and each day once; let us receive each one as a gift from God and an opportunity to move towards growth and healing and to invest in things that are of lasting significance.