How do you start bringing the neglected parts of your life under God’s care? Begin by finding out which part has been neglected. Below you will take an honest inventory of five areas of life that coach BJ Thompson names, choose the one that has received the least attention, and work on it a little every day for five days.
You can do this alone with a notebook and a Bible. A group can meet once at the start and once at the end, with each person working through the daily steps on their own in between. Nobody needs to tell anyone else which area they chose or why.
Start with what you are asked to love God with
Before the inventory, read two short passages slowly. Do not interpret them yet. Just notice what they include.
When Jesus is asked for the first commandment, he answers, “And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength” (Mark 12:30). In the next verse he adds love of neighbor. Paul ends his first letter to the Thessalonians with a prayer: “And the very God of peace sanctify you wholly; and I pray God your whole spirit and soul and body be preserved blameless unto the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Thessalonians 5:23).
Count the parts of a person each passage names. Then notice the words that hold those parts together: “all” in Mark, “wholly” and “whole” in Thessalonians. A careful reader should not press these lists into a precise map of human nature. Paul is praying, and Jesus is quoting the Shema. Still, both treat the person as one, and both assume God wants every part.
Lisa Fields describes what happens when Christians lose that wholeness. For many believers, she says, “their spiritual growth to them is divorced from every other aspect of their lives.” If the morning quiet time happened, they count themselves healthy. The week ahead tests that assumption against your own life.
The inventory
Thompson explains that he kept meeting a pattern: people who “either focus on one area, like the spiritual, but you don’t know anything about the other areas like the mental.” The areas he names are mental, physical, spiritual, emotional and professional. Use them as your inventory.
Give each area a number from one to ten. A ten means it is tended and healthy. A one means it is in serious trouble and being ignored. Next to each number, write one honest sentence about what you actually see.
- Spiritual: prayer, Scripture, worship, and whether your walk with God is more than a habit.
- Mental: your thought life, what you feed your mind, what you are learning, whether you have peace.
- Physical: sleep, food, movement, and any health warnings you have set aside.
- Emotional: whether you can name what you feel, and whether there are parts of your past you keep closing the door on.
- Professional: your work, your calling, and whether you do your daily labor as service or just survive it.
Then run one cross-check that cuts through all five. Lisa Fields puts it bluntly: “your relationship with God is only as good as your relationship with other people.” Look at your closest relationships. Are they steady, or marked by constant friction, distance or avoidance? Hold the answer carefully. Strain can come from another person’s behavior, from illness, or from a hard season you did not choose, so a gap between a high spiritual number and chaotic relationships is a prompt to examine yourself honestly. It does not prove your spiritual score is false.
Thompson offers another check. “You gotta look for correlating signals,” he says. “The signals are not just what you feel in your faith.” His examples include feeling trapped in your body, living in constant tension with others, and old memories you keep shutting down. Read over your five sentences and ask whether any describe a signal like that.
Now circle the lowest number. If two tie, pick the one you have spiritualized most, the one you pray about but never act on. That area is your work for the next five days.
For groups: Have everyone complete the inventory privately. Do not collect or compare scores. Treat a low number as useful information. The inventory loses its honesty the moment it becomes a contest or a public confession. Discuss these instead.
- Before you took the inventory, which area did you assume was your strongest? Did the numbers agree?
- Lisa Fields ties the quality of our relationship with God to our relationships with people. Where does that claim seem clearly right to you, and where would you want to qualify it?
Two cautions
There is a way to fail at this that looks like success. You pick your weak area, pour yourself into it, and make it the new center of your life. Thompson warns that people “wanna just camp out on an area of life,” and treat it as the key to everything. “Well, no, that’s just one area.” The goal is to let God’s care reach a place it has not been allowed to reach. Trading a spiritual box for a fitness box misses it.
Also, a low physical or emotional number is no proof of failure. Bodies get sick and minds struggle for reasons no one chose. Stewardship means tending what is yours to tend, without blaming yourself for what is not.
Day one: ask before you fix
Read Psalm 139:23-24: “Search me, O God, and know my heart: try me, and know my thoughts: And see if there be any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.”
Notice the order. The psalmist asks to be searched before he asks to be led. Lisa Fields describes praying this way during a season of being more intentional in her devotional life. She asked, “God, what in me needs to change?” and, in her words, “He brought like five people to mind.” The answer had nothing to do with her prayer routine. It concerned her relationships.
Practice: Spend ten quiet minutes with your circled area. Pray the psalm, then ask the same plain question about that one area. Write down whatever comes, without solving any of it today. If nothing comes, write down what you have been avoiding looking at. That counts as an answer.
Day two: separate fault from responsibility
Some of what is wrong in your area may have been done to you. Thompson writes about an event from when he was five years old that shaped much of his life, and how long it took him to see it. The sentence he arrived at was, “It’s not my fault, but it is my responsibility.”
He is careful here. He also admits that sometimes people create their own damage, and the sentence does not assume either story. Fault looks backward and asks who caused the problem. Responsibility looks forward and asks who will tend it now.
Practice: Write two sentences about your area. The first begins, It is not my fault that… or, if it fits, Part of this I caused when… The second begins, It is my responsibility now to… Keep the second sentence small and specific. If the first half touches real trauma, the honest second half may simply be to find a counselor. Getting that kind of help is one way of taking responsibility, and Lisa Fields counts it as real work: “Therapy is a part of the work, but a good therapist will tell you that the work really happens after the session.”
Day three: one action with a date on it
Read James 1:22: “But be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves.” James calls hearing without doing a form of self-deception. The person who only listens is fooling themselves.
Thompson names the same trap. “Too many times we want faith that is a substance of our intent, not the manifestation of us putting effort towards moving the ball forward.” He describes Spirit-filled believers with high blood pressure who “don’t see the correlation of their faith and their habits.” When something is wrong, he says, “it’s okay to admit that something’s wrong,” and the response may mean using practical tools: “I wanna restore order where there is chaos.”
Before you act, notice: what have you been praying about in your circled area that a single practical step could address?
Practice: Turn your day-two responsibility sentence into one action you can complete this week: book the appointment, take the walk, open the budget, block an hour for the task at work you have been dodging. Write the action and the day you will do it. Then do it. A good action passes two tests. Someone watching could see whether you did it, and it addresses the area you circled rather than an easier one next to it.
Day four: find someone who has done it
Read Proverbs 13:20: “He that walketh with wise men shall be wise: but a companion of fools shall be destroyed.” A proverb states a principle about influence, and it still makes a real claim: who you walk with shapes who you become.
Thompson says the help worth seeking comes from people with proof of concept, meaning “the person who is giving the instruction has done in real life consistently the thing that you’re seeking to do.” Asking requires what he calls “humility, not humiliation,” the plain admission that you tried and it is not working. He also draws a line. Seeking someone’s specific skill is different from using them. He wants us to lean on others “as a necessity, not as a utility.”
Practice: Name one person who has done well, over time, in your circled area: a friend, a pastor, a coach, a doctor or a counselor. Ask them one specific question this week, such as how they started or what they would do first in your place. If no one comes to mind, ask someone you trust who they would recommend.
Day five: retake the inventory
Read Romans 12:18: “If it be possible, as much as lieth in you, live peaceably with all men.” Paul builds two limits into the command: “if it be possible” and “as much as lieth in you.” You carry your part of the peace. Another person’s choices remain theirs.
That matters for the relational cross-check. Lisa Fields describes going back to situations where she felt wronged, choosing to “be a peacemaker when you don’t want to be,” and finding weight lifted that she did not know she was carrying. If your inventory pointed to a strained relationship, a conversation like that may be the first step. Peacemaking never means returning to someone who is harming you. If a relationship involves abuse or makes you unsafe, the responsible step is to protect yourself and get help. In the US the National Domestic Violence Hotline is 1-800-799-7233.
Practice: Take the full inventory again without looking at your first scores, then compare. The number for your circled area may barely move in five days, and that is fine. Look at the sentence beside it. Is it more honest, more specific, or more hopeful than the first? Did any other area shift because you worked on this one? Write down what the week showed you about how your areas affect each other. Then decide whether to stay with this area another week or move to the next lowest, and write the next action with its date.
For the closing conversation
For groups: Let people speak only to what they choose to share. Someone may say only that they took one step, and that is enough. If a person names a deep wound, resist rushing to a verse or a solution. Listen, and help them think about who could walk with them, such as a counselor or pastor.
- Which was harder for you this week, asking God what needed to change or acting on the answer? Why do you think that is?
- Thompson separates fault from responsibility. Can you think of a situation where that distinction would help someone, and one where it could be misused?
- When you asked for help on day four, what did you have to admit first? Did it feel more like humility or humiliation?
- Look back at Mark 12:30 and 1 Thessalonians 5:23. After this week, what do you notice in them that you missed on the first reading?
- What would change in how you judge your own spiritual health if the morning quiet time were no longer the only test?
Before you close the notebook, write the name of the area you will bring to God next week and the first step you will take there.