Missing Milestones

[featured_image]Today as I was driving from Yakima to Bellevue my car reached a milestone. My 2000 Ford Explorer has now traveled over 200,000 miles.

I’ve actually been anticipating this for several months. I’ve been curious to know when it would happen and if I would actually be the one driving at the time! I didn’t want to miss it. 200,000 miles seems like quite a distance traveled.

Let me tell you how it happened. I was returning today from speaking last night at the Perspectives on the World Christian Movement class. (BTW – if you’ve never taken this course, I highly recommend it).

As soon as I got in the car I realized that today was the day and most likely it would happen sometime during my drive over the pass. Since I didn’t want to miss the moment, I did some “simple” math in my head and calculated when I thought it would happen. Then I literally set an alarm on my phone to go off about 5 minutes earlier than I had projected the moment.

As the alarm sounded, I was talking on the phone and glad that I had taken the extra step to make certain that I didn’t miss it. I watched the odometer as it crept past 199,990 miles and began to consider how I would “capture” the moment. I decided to take two pictures with my cell phone – one at 199,999 and another at 200,000. Because it might be dangerous to do this while driving I committed myself to pull over to the side of the road to memorialize the moment.

Here are my two pictures:

You may think that it’s rather silly for me to pull over twice on the interstate to take two photos to capture this milestone. You may think this whole story of my experience is pretty ridiculous.

But let me ask you this:

How do you celebrate milestones in your life?

I’m not just talking about birthdays or anniversaries. Think about your goals for last year. How did you capture the completion of your goals? How did you celebrate them?

If you are like many people it is likely that you missed the milestones. Possibly you were busy doing other things, or so overwhelmed by your next big goal, that you actually missed the milestone. I think this happens too often in our lives. We miss milestones. We don’t capture the moment. We fail to celebrate the accomplishment. Sometimes this happens simply because we weren’t paying attention. We weren’t anticipating the moment. My encouragement to you is to anticipate the accomplishment of your goals. Don’t miss the milestones. Set an alarm to remind you not to miss it. And then plan your celebrate moment. In honor of my Explorer reaching 200,000 miles I have decided to get it washed this week. My car deserves to be cared for after traveling so far. (It’s the least I could do.)