Note: I apologize for not posting yesterday. A friend had a health emergency, and I had to spend the day helping with their little one. The good news is that he is healing well, and I got to spend yesterday with the sweetest one year old I know. In today’s post, I will try to cover both thriftiness and faith by writing about a topic I have been thinking about quite a bit lately:.

Awareness

Recently I realized that so much of the growth in my life has come from simply becoming more aware of my options and the impact of my choices. For example, just recently my husband and I just completed Dave Ramsey’s Financial Peace University class. Through this class we learned to become more aware of how our financial decisions were impacting our future. By becoming more aware of the impact of our current decisions, and learning how to make better choices we have been empowered to take significant steps towards financial health.

This process has caused me to ask: How many other areas of my health are being affected by my lack of awareness. Am I aware of how my choices are impacting my physical, spiritual, and emotional health? Awareness also plays a vital role in learning to live an eco-friendly life. Here are a few questions I ask myself to increase my awareness and improve my overall health (I have arranged the questions by topic in the acronym PRESENT to increase memorability):

Physical: How is my body feeling? Do I feel tense or fatigued? Have I given myself what I need in terms of water, exercise, and sunlight to help my body function at optimum levels?

Relational: How are my relationships? Am I making a positive impact on those around me?

Emotional: Have I emotionally checked-in with myself lately? How am I feeling? Are there any warning emotions that might be trying to tell me I need to deal with something? Have I been stuffing or hiding any feelings I need to let out? Or conversely, have I been allowing myself to become totally dominated by my feelings?

Spiritual: Have I fed my soul this week? Have I been intentional about pursing spiritual growth?

Environmental: Have I been conscious of my use of resources this week? Did my use of water, electricity, gas, and paper products reflect my desire to reduce my carbon footprint?

Nutritional: Am I making decent choices with my food this week? Is there one area I could improve on?

Time Management: Did how I used my time today contribute to a healthier life? Did I allow myself adequate times of rest while still accomplishing my most important goals? Did I remain focused on the big picture and avoid “majoring on the minors”?

Attending to the PRESENT by asking yourselves these questions will arm you with the knowledge to both celebrate your successes and improve your weaknesses. It is vital to take time to monitor ourselves in order to be aware of how our current actions impact our long-term goals. Even when make mistakes, we must not allow defeat to set in. Remember that achieving goals is a step-by-step process. Just like weeks are made up of days, days made up of hours, and hours of minutes, a healthy life is the sum of millions of small positive choices. We must be in the life-long process of learning how to make the best choices.

So often we get stuck in a routine and settle for “good enough” or “I’m-surviving” choices, when we were created for so much more. The daily grind threatens to lull us into contentment with the average when better is so much closer than we think. For me, the journey to healthier living is all about awareness.