By Pr Isaiah White
Welcome to the New Year 2024, and our word of encouragement as we start the year is from Proverbs 23:18: “There is surely a future hope for you, and your hope will not be cut off.”
There is a future for your spiritual, physical, mental social, professional and financial life. Let us break down each:
Spiritual
There is a future for your spiritual life. Your spiritual life comprises some obvious factors: your relationship with God, your prayer life, your small group, your Bible study group, your church membership and attendance.
But consider also your habits, both sacred (like a daily devotional) and mundane (like brushing your teeth); how does your relationship with God surround and inhabit your daily life, and not just the times you’ve set aside for it?
Physical
There is a future for your physical life. Your physical life encompasses every aspect of physical health. Just as above, there are some obvious components, like physical fitness, diet, and disease.
But other aspects of physical self-care might not immediately come to mind: eating regularly, preventive medicine, sleep, sports, intentional rest, or perhaps your sex life (it probably also falls under spiritual, mental, and relational, although hopefully not professional).
Mental
There is a future for your mental life. Your mental life concerns your intellectual, emotional, and psychological health.
Education falls pretty clearly under “intellectual,” but so does trying new foods or learning to garden.
Your emotions, positive and negative, live here too—although they are likely to be heavily influenced by every other category in this list.
And while “psychological health” sounds a bit terrifying, it is no less crucial than your physical health, and may in fact drive it to some extent.
Social /relational
There is a future for your relationship life. Your social life captures the things you think it captures: your friends, your family, your boyfriend/girlfriend/spouse, your co-workers, your mentors, your children, your students among others.
When we get to it, we will break this category down even further into five specific relationships: God, family (parents, children, siblings), and the opposite sex (girlfriend/boyfriend/spouse).
Professional
There is a future for your professional life. Your professional life includes both your job and your career, whether that looks like traditional employment, self-employment, or non-employment, any of which can be either healthy or unhealthy.
Your mentorship relationships might live here, as well as your relationships with your co-workers and maybe even yourself.
Because many of us derive our identity from our jobs, our professional life probably has more of an impact on our overall wellness than we might think at first glance.
Financial
Finally, there is a future for your financial life. Your financial life is just that: your relationship with money. So, many people spend their entire lives focused on only this segment.
It gets the vast majority of their time and energy that we saved it for last. If we are completely healthy, this area is probably limited to making money and giving it away.
But of course, there is also getting out of debt, saving, buying a house (maybe!), buying food and clothes and a more other things, and eventually, hopefully, retirement.
Your financial life can easily become not just overwhelming but all-encompassing.
