"But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you."
Matthew 6:33 (ESV)"The thing that is really hard, and really wonderful, is giving up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself. The first demand of the kingdom is that we stop pretending. The kingdom is not an addition to our present life, it is a complete reorientation of it."
Dorothy Sayers, *The Mind of the Maker*"And this, 'seek first God's kingdom,' is the one thing that is needful. It is the one thing that makes life simple. For the person who wills one thing, life becomes simpler, because the manifold distractions of the world lose their power. The person who wills the Good, in truth, does not will it for the sake of reward, but for its own sake. And in that single willing, the whole of life becomes unified."
Søren Kierkegaard, *Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing*"For the Word of God, knowing that the corruption of men could not be undone otherwise than by death, yet being Himself immortal and the Son of the Father, took a mortal body, that in it He might offer Himself as a substitute for all, and being of all the most powerful, might overcome death in the body once for all. For the human race would have perished utterly had not the Lord and Saviour of all, the Son of God, come to accomplish the end of death."
Athanasius of Alexandria, *On the Incarnation*, §9-10"I must make a decision here and now to seek God first, not as a supplement to my life but as the foundation of it. The kingdom does not come by adding one more religious activity to a crowded calendar. It comes by subtraction -- by clearing out the clutter of self-interest and setting the heart on one thing. And that one thing is not a vague spirituality but the concrete rule of God over every square inch of existence. Until this is the operating principle of the day, the day is not yet lived in the kingdom."
William Law, *A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life*What would today look like if my first, second, and third priority was the same thing?
"It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and it has been given in sufficiently generous measure to allow the accomplishment of the greatest things if the whole of it is well invested. But when it is squandered in soft and careless living, when it is spent on no worthwhile goal, we are forced at last by death's final constraint to realize that it has passed away before we knew it was passing. So it is: we are not given a short life but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it."
Seneca, *On the Shortness of Life*, §1Clear -- 64°F | Humidity: 77% | Wind: ↑10 mph