Imagine Part 10 “Imagine if We Got the Big Things Right” THRIVE Service Livestream

It’s referred to as the rock, pebble, sand story.

A professor once stood up before his class with a large empty jar. He filled the jar to the top with large rocks and asked his students if the jar was full.

The students said that yes, the jar was full.

He then added small pebbles to the jar, and shook it so the pebbles could disperse themselves among the larger rocks.

Then he asked again, “Is the jar full now?”

The students agreed that the jar was still full.

The professor then poured sand into the jar to fill up any remaining empty space.

The same question was asked, “Is the jar now full?”

The students finally agreed that the jar was now completely full.

The takeaway is that if you start with putting little things like sand in first, you won’t have room for rocks or pebbles.

So, the lesson is, start with the big things, the most important things, first. Make sure they’re in place and everything else can be added later.

We make a lot of choices, some of them hard, others easy. According to research, the average adult makes 33,000 to 35,000 total decisions each day, including what we eat, what we wear, what we say, and how we’ll say it.

Over the course of a lifetime, the average person will make 773,618 decisions – and will come to regret 143,262 of them.

Meaning we don’t always get it right.

Mary and Martha host a dinner for Jesus. Mary makes a controversial decision. She takes a jar of expensive perfume and anoints the feet of Jesus. Judas immediately complains, “What a waste of money! Surely, we could have found a better use for it. Maybe sell it and give the proceeds to the poor who really need it.” And honestly, Judas’s objection is not completely wrong.

But Jesus sees something different in that moment. Mary, in that moment knows what matters most.

We make thousands of choices every single day. Some decisions we’ll get right. Other choices we make will be the wrong ones.

We’re all imperfect people. We’re going to make mistakes.

No matter how hard we try, we’re not always going to make the right decision or choose the right path.

But imagine, just imagine, if we got the big things right.