Ordering Your Private World: A Review

I had never desired to read Ordering Your Private World by Gordon MacDonald when I first saw its title in 1984.  Perhaps that was because I don’t like taking orders.  Or maybe because I have little order in my life. You might think I live in chaos if you surveyed my desk or any other flat surface in my home.  Or it may have been because I believed that my private world was in order or, even if it wasn’t, I had no ability to bring such order.  Or perhaps I likened this book to another book on organization I had purchased which I could not bring myself to read past the first chapter, and finally discarded.  In 2017, however, I noted the words “Revised and Updated” above the title and decided to give Ordering Your Private World a chance, harboring the faint hope that perhaps even I could have order in my life or at least in my life’s private world.

From the beginning, the Authors Note encouraged me with these words: “I am still challenged—every day!—by the notion of ordering my private world.”  So, Gordon MacDonald who wrote about bringing order to our private world did not even have his own private world in order many years later.  It’s both encouraging to know that organization is a problem for a successful person, but also discouraging to realize that after all these time, he is still challenged by the effort. 

The Preface provides additional discouragement.  The author is married, has children, and one day suddenly realizes that his professional life, family life, and spiritual life are in shambles and he has no ready answers.  His natural talents and gifts enabled him to do well in his profession, but they had masked the reality that his spiritual life was weak and shallow. He suffered a complete breakdown.  And then Jesus said to him, “Now you know what it’s like to live out of an empty soul.”  To live.  Out of an empty soul.  Isn’t that a bit like kicking someone when they’re down?  But we must remember that Jesus didn’t say “Yay, Peter!” when Peter walked on the water.  Instead, when Peter feared he would drown, Jesus reached out a hand and said “You of little faith, why did you doubt?”  Is Jesus reaching out a hand to you in this book?  Maybe.

I plowed ahead into the first chapters because having order in our private world is important.  What do we do with our souls?  How do we exercise soul care?  Body care is relatively simple.  We eat right, exercise, and sleep an appropriate number of hours.  But what about our soulish part?  What about that undefined space where God’s Spirit resides?  What do we do about that?  As I listen to acorns drop and the squirrels rustling aside the fallen leaves to search for them and plant them, I wonder how we find and nourish our souls during our own dark nights and cold days.   Here’s what the author found:  If our private world is weak, we become empty shells, rotten nuts.  Like the squirrels in autumn, we must formulate a plan to find the best nuts and secure those in a cache for leaner times.  It requires work in advance of the need, and quality rather than quantity.

Our plan must be wide.  No squirrel concentrates only on one tree.  We must take direction from those wiser than us: from the Bible and Biblical mentors.  We must maintain control of our passions and gifts or we will become self-centered in an uncontrolled pursuit of more, more adulation, more high-level connections, more, more, more.  We will rush after the goal rather than paying attention to the process and see people only as a means to our end.  We will discover disloyalty everywhere and nurture our anger rather than giving it to God.  Indeed, we may become so busy hurrying after what is of little worth, that we have no time or desire to play and or to exercise spiritual activities.   Sound like anyone you know?  A prime example from the Bible is King Saul. 

Saul begins as a warrior king who spirals downward.  Like Saul, when we pursue our passions above all else, we forget that we are called out ones, people with a purpose that is larger than ourselves and which supersedes our passions.  We know the One who called us and do not assume ownership of either our work or the people we work with.   Called people know when to move forward and when to fall back and release. 

According to the author, how do we implement our called-out purpose? Control our time—like Jesus we must know when to pray, when to act, when to sleep (yes, even sleep can be a soulish activity, for in that sleep, what dreams may come!), and to understand our limits.  Like John the Baptist we cannot hold onto a position forever.  At some point we will be called to release our activity, our calling, just as John released his crowds, his disciples, and his reputation to Jesus.

How do we control time?  According to the author, if we do not control our time, we become disorganized, feel poorly about our work, and lack intimacy with God.  How did Jesus do it?  He understood his purpose, his mission.  Jesus understood his limits as a human being, and a man, and a Jew in a time of Roman occupation.  He listened and observed.  He worked within His limits and within His culture.  And he made time to be with a few important people (his disciples).  Who are the people who are important to you?  Do you make time for them?  Listen to them?  Who are you spending the most time with?  Maybe it’s time for a change.

How do we change? Recognize that unmanaged time flows toward our weaknesses and we spend time doing thing that are not helpful.  And because we are not managing our time, someone else may mange it for us—we may be unduly influenced by dominant people.  When we fail to manage time, we end up putting out fires and neglecting what we really need to do. Our unmanaged time is used to bring us immediate gratification and not for what is most important.  Time is best managed when it is budgeted far in advance.  If an activity is set for a certain date, all that precedes that activity can be accomplished in the most effective manner.  But, if we try to be consistently spontaneous, we will invariably forget something important.

However, even if we do everything right, there may come that dark night of the soul, that desert experience that leaves us adrift in a lake of sand.  Jesus made a point of spending time in deserted places.  What happens there?  Our senses are heightened.  Away from noise and the call of the ordinary, we can experience the extraordinary.  We may be able to hear God more clearly.  We may view life from a different perspective.  We learn dependence.  And in the bleakest of desert times, we are accorded freedom to hear thoughts that lead us in a new direction, that give us a different plan, that help us prepare.

And here’s my main quibble with Ordering Your Private World: the book is disorganized.  I don’t know if it’s because new material was added without rewriting the old material, but it is most evident in my outline as I search back and forth for topics that fit together.  This was one difficult book to follow.  So far, this review has taken you through the first seven of 15 chapters.  The final eight chapters deal with spiritual disciplines such as endurance, mindfulness, silence, solitude, reflection, meditation, prayer, friendship, and rest.  Only Chapter 13 on prayer was one into which I could sink my teeth. 

Prayer is difficult.  Gordon MacDonald asks “Why do we have trouble praying?”  Yes, why?  It should be second nature for those of us who carry God’s spirit within us, but it’s not.   Gordon MacDonald has the answers and if we absorb these and let them work in us, we will realize that prayer is a vital necessity for ordering our private world.  Yes, worship and intercession feel unnatural.  They are not part of everyday life in America.  Nor is it normal to worship what we cannot see and to intercede with One we cannot physically encounter.   When we pray, we act contrary to our culture and it creates a dissonance within us—a dissonance that may keep us from prayer.

Praying exposes our weaknesses.  Even as we proclaim our dependence on God, we tacitly declare our independence and self-sufficiency.  We are Americans, after all.  We overcome, we endure, we succeed.  We are DIYers.  At some point, however, we have to learn that we cannot do everything, that we are not as strong as we think we are, and that we lose relationship with others when we do not ask them to help us and with God when we don’t depend on Him.  

And perhaps, prayer seems irrelevant when no matter how much we pray, or how little, the results or don’t happen anyway.  We have become fatalists.  We see prayer as only a means to an end result.  But prayer is not about getting results.   Prayer is aligning our thoughts, motives, and desires, indeed our whole selves, with God so that we may participate in his work in the world.  We pray to seek His will, not to impose our own on Him.  But just as we struggle for independence wouldn’t we like a world fashioned after our own passions?  Indeed, this is the very struggle we have in prayer.  Not my will, but Thine. 

And once we have, but how feebly, prayed to the point where we are aligned with God’s will, then, and only then, notes Gordon MacDonald can we effectively intercede for another in prayer. 

Ordering Your Private World was a useful book to read for time management and an overview of spiritual disciplines.  For an in-depth ordered view of the disciplines, I recommend Celebration of Discipline: The Path To Spiritual Growth by Richard J. Foster.  Ordering Your Private World also made me more mindful about how I use time.  Recognizing that unmanaged time flows toward my passions causes me think twice before I perform any activity.  Is it useful?  Will it bring improvement?  Or am I just doing what I like doing to the excess?  And what about you?  You must recognize your own times of maximum effectiveness and have criteria for time usage.  Ask yourself, does it advance a cause, is it useful for others, is it helpful to your Christian life?  Will it bring you closer to God?  Will it allow you to rest, relax, or play?  Take the best from multiple good choices. And, when you are able, budget time far in advance so you can effectively use the intervening time to efficiently prepare for the future event.  

A wise presenter once told me that if his audience took only one new idea, tool, or perspective from his talk, he felt that he had done a good job with his topic.  Ordering Your Private World is a tool to use to step out and begin your exploration of time management and spiritual disciplines.  Anyone can take away at least one new idea, tool, or perspective from this book. Or your time may be better spent reading the Bible and paying attention to how Jesus lived, reading a good business book (perhaps the classic 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Steven R. Covey), finding a good personal time management book, and reading Celebration of Discipline provides keen insight into the spiritual disciplines and why they are important.

 I received this book free through a book review program. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.