When we’re struggling in a season marked by fruitlessness, the Sunday school answer is to center our thinking on the gospel. We shouldn’t worry about what we’ve done or not done, but remind ourselves of what God has done for us in Christ. Now, it’s never a bad strategy to spend time thinking about the gospel! But there’s an additional strategy we can employ, one followed by King David, that can keep us from falling into discouragement. It requires us to see not only the big picture of what God has done for us in Christ, but also the ways God is working in our everyday lives. 

I’m a work-from-home wife/mother/sales strategy consultant/writer who is blessed with the spiritual gift of time mismanagement. I’m constantly on the lookout for the magic to-do list that will help me weave the threads of all my vocations into a glorious tapestry, instead of the giant, knotty mess they often are.

A recent blog post caught my attention with its updated take on an old technique. Each Friday, it suggested, you should spend some time writing a “got done” list for what you’ve accomplished. The idea is simple: Focusing on your accomplishments will improve your emotional state and fuel your enthusiasm to keep working through the list of things you still have to do.

What Got Done

The idea is helpful, if not exactly new. Who among us hasn’t supplemented the bottom of our to-do list with a few things we already did, only to immediately check them off? Yet sometimes our fight to find things important enough to put under the “done” column can make our hearts sink, not soar.

Many days in my early years of motherhood, caring for three daughters aged 4 and younger, the single line on my “done” list would have read “survived.”

These days, though my “done” lists are longer, my “results” lists can still look distressingly empty. E-mails go unanswered; article submissions languish in obscurity. Others experience this sort of discouragement in a different ways. The unemployed father of four has his “done” list of job applications submitted, but no interview invitations. The high school senior has her “done” list of college applications sent, but no acceptance letters received. We toil, but our labors don’t always produce fruit.

What God Did

When we’re struggling in a season marked by fruitlessness, the Sunday school answer is to center our thinking on the gospel. We shouldn’t worry about what we’ve done or not done, but remind ourselves of what God has done for us in Christ. Now, it’s never a bad strategy to spend time thinking about the gospel! But there’s an additional strategy we can employ, one followed by King David, that can keep us from falling into discouragement. It requires us to see not only the big picture of what God has done for us in Christ, but also the ways God is working in our everyday lives.

If someone asked David what he’d done the day the events of 1 Samuel 21 unfolded, “survived” would’ve been a legitimate answer.

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