Discipline yourself. Keep bringing yourself back very frequently to the basic purpose of your life. As far as practical, pause very briefly every hour on the hour for re-orientation of your thoughts and activities. Put aside all passing problems for a moment alone with God and with His eternal peace. Our greatest problem is distraction and forgetfulness. The whole weight of the natural mind is to low and present things. We must keep pulling the mind upward. It is not merely for man's convenience that God has caused the day to be divided into hours. They should be points of reference, compass settings, memory markers. Like the year and the month and the day and the seven-day cycle, they are measuring milestones of pause, review and refreshing. We mean well, and we plan well, we determine well: but remembering and staying consistently on course are our besetting problems. Set yourself up periodic memory points, course-checking points. Of course the ideal is CONSTANT unwavering awareness; a perfect, undeviating, arrow-straight course toward the eternal goal. But we are weak creatures. Life is an endless, painful (though joyful and glorious) struggle to keep bringing ourselves back to being what we ought to be and doing what we ought to do.

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