Perhaps summer is your favorite season, or Sunday is your favorite day of the week. One problem with favorites is that often we spend too much time bemoaning their passing and celebrating their arrival that we neglect to enjoy the other days and seasons. Each season has its beauty and everyday is a new page in our lives with opportunities to write new lines and experience new life. Favorites are comfortable places but if we are not careful, we will lose our spirit of adventure and miss opportunities to grow, go new places and do new things. Favorites, however, give us a needed base of security and familiarity so that we are not lost in the chaos of adventure. We need familiar places and well-known faces.
If we think of life as an adventurous journey we can always venture away from the comfortable and return to safe places. To test your adventurous spirit, think of times you have been in new settings or in new groups, were you willing to meet and talk to new people or venture out and see new territory? Do you have a favorite aunt, uncle, friend, or child? Do you spend so much time with them that you neglect to see the beauty and uniqueness of the others?
Discipline comes with routine, but discipline also helps us to routinely change the routine. Grow, success, and progress involve routine and expansion. Growth is stretching from favorite and familiar places. Perhaps the real discipline for success is making the season you are in now your favorite and today the favorite day on your journey. The Psalmist of the Bible said, “This is the day that the Lord has made, we will rejoice and be glad in it.” (Psalm 118:24)