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I’m still writing about lessons learned during our Alaskan cruise…

I’ve said that the ship was a marvel, like walking around a high-end hotel. How do they keep it like that? It’s at sea continuously–less than four hours after we disembarked in Seattle, a new crop of passengers was boarding, and off they went again.

Answer: continuous improvement.

One morning we came back to our cabin, and three guys were in there changing out the bedside lamps. Now there was nothing wrong with the existing lamps, but new ones were a bit nicer, including a place to charge your phone. And it’s a 15-minute process to change them since the bedside tables are anchored to the ship, and the lamps are anchored to the tables. With 1300 cabins, changing lamps is a significant process. So they keep chipping away at it, one cabin at a time while the ship is at sea.

Sometimes we wait to do something thinking, “I’ll wait until I have time to do it right.” Marie Kondo, for example, the tidying guru, advocates going through all your books at once. Take them all off the shelves and put back only those which “spark joy.” Same with closets filled with clothes. That makes decluttering a massive project that’s tough to find time for.

By contrast, in her book Decluttering at the Speed of Life, Dana White advocates a more incremental approach. If you see one book on the shelf that you don’t need and take it immediately to the giveaway box in the garage, you’ve made progress!

Continuous improvement: it applies to saving money. I have an app that rounds up my purchases and drops the money into a savings account. There’s over $2,000 in that account accumulated in just a couple years. For those of us that eat too much, can we just cut down a little? And start exercising…a little? Spiritually, the Lord would rather we spend a dedicated 15 minutes with him in the morning than NOT spend an hour! Memorizing chapters from the Bible might be nice, but how about one verse? And holy moments? we can start that habit now, too, even if it’s just one.

Our daily actions, the small ones, make a difference.

Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind… (Romans 12.2, ESV)

I walked by the field of a lazy person, the vineyard of one with no common sense. I saw that it was overgrown with nettles. It was covered with weeds, and its walls were broken down. Then, as I looked and thought about it, I learned this lesson: A little extra sleep, a little more slumber, a little folding of the hands to rest—then poverty will pounce on you like a bandit; scarcity will attack you like an armed robber. (Proverbs 24.30 – 34, NLT)