Jesus said, "Seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well" (Matthew 6:33). What we put first shapes everything else.
These seven stories about priorities, retold in our own words, include a classroom object lesson, a cheeky letter home, a coach's surprising answer, a missionary's long road, an inventor who nearly missed his moment, a country doctor's question and the race to the Moon. Each ends with a takeaway for sermons or reflection.
Stories in this collection:
- Put the Big Rocks in First
- A Letter Home From College
- Wayne Bennett's Greatest Achievement
- David Livingstone's Long Road
- Alexander Graham Bell and the Patent That Nearly Wasn't
- "Are You Being a Good Citizen?": A Doctor's Question
- The Space Race: A Giant Leap, and a Hard Question
Put the Big Rocks in First
A popular object lesson, made famous by Stephen Covey. We retell it in our own words.
A university lecturer used to begin his first class each year by announcing that he was about to teach his students the most important thing they would learn during their entire time at the university.
He took out a large glass jar and set it on the table in front of him. Then he brought out about a dozen fist-sized rocks and carefully placed them, one at a time, in the jar.
When the jar was filled to the top, he asked, Is this jar full? Everyone in the class said yes.
Really? he said. He reached under the table and pulled out a bucket of gravel. He tipped some into the jar and shook it, so that the small stones worked their way down into the spaces between the big rocks.
Then he smiled and asked again, Is the jar full? By now the class had caught on. Probably not, one student answered.
Good! he said. He reached under the table again and brought out a bucket of sand. He poured it in, and it filled all the gaps between the rocks and the gravel. Once more he asked, Is this jar full?
No! the class shouted. Good! he said again. Then he picked up a jug of water and poured it in until the jar was full to the brim.
Finally he looked up at the class and asked, What is the point of this illustration?
One eager student put up her hand. The point is that no matter how full your schedule is, if you try really hard, you can always fit more into it.
Another joked that the water went in last, so however busy you are, there is always time for a drink.
No, the lecturer said. That's not the point. The point is this: if you don't put the big rocks in first, you will never get them in at all. Make sure you put the big rocks into your life first.
Takeaway: What are the big rocks in your life: God, family, relationships, your calling? Schedule them first, or the sand of busyness will fill every space.
Source: Popular illustration, made famous in Stephen Covey, A. Roger Merrill and Rebecca Merrill, First Things First (1994).
A Letter Home From College
A humorous letter that has circulated for decades; its author is unknown.
A college student, three months into her first term, wrote a letter home to her parents.
She began by apologising for not having written sooner, and promised to bring them up to date. But before they read any further, she said, they should sit down. They were not to read on unless they were sitting down.
She was getting along quite well now, she wrote. The fractured skull and concussion she had suffered when she jumped out of her dormitory window during a fire, shortly after arriving, were nearly healed. She had only spent two weeks in hospital, she could now see almost normally, and she only got those terrible headaches once a day.
Fortunately, she went on, the fire and her jump had been seen by an attendant at the petrol station near the dormitory. He had called the fire brigade and the ambulance. He had also visited her in hospital, and since she had nowhere to live after the fire, he had kindly invited her to share his flat. It was really just a basement room, but it was rather sweet.
He was a lovely young man, she wrote, and they had fallen deeply in love and were planning to marry. They had not set a date yet, but it would be before her pregnancy began to show. Yes, she told her parents, she was pregnant. She knew how much they had been looking forward to being grandparents, and she was sure they would love the baby as they had loved her.
The only reason for delaying the wedding, she explained, was that her boyfriend had some large debts from his three previous marriages that he needed to pay off first.
Then came the last paragraph. Now that she had brought them up to date, she wanted them to know that there had been no fire. She had not had a concussion or a fractured skull. She had not been in hospital. She was not pregnant, she was not engaged, and there was no one in her life at all.
However, she was getting a D in history and an F in science, and she wanted them to see those marks in their proper perspective.
Takeaway: Perspective changes everything. Many of the things that upset us most look very different beside what truly matters.
Source: Traditional humorous letter; author unknown.
Wayne Bennett's Greatest Achievement
Wayne Bennett is one of the most successful coaches in the history of rugby league. For many years he coached the Brisbane Broncos in Australia's national competition, and by 2002 he had already led them to several premierships.
Bennett is revered by many of his players, famously guarded with journalists and widely respected across the sport.
In 2002 he launched a book, Don't Die With the Music in You. The launch was attended by a host of rugby league figures, sporting celebrities and business leaders. Many must have expected him to talk about his trophies and his remarkable record.
Instead, according to newspaper reports, when he spoke about his greatest success in life, he turned not to football but to his family. He paid tribute to his wife, Trish.
Staying married to her, he said, was one of his greatest achievements, and he hoped it would remain his greatest achievement for the rest of his life. It was what he wanted more than anything else: for his marriage and his relationships with his family to last for ever.
For a man who had won almost everything in his profession, it was a striking statement about what really matters.
Takeaway: Public success fades. The relationships we nurture at home are the achievements that last.
Source: The Sydney Morning Herald, 8 May 2002.
David Livingstone's Long Road
David Livingstone is remembered as one of the great missionaries and explorers of the nineteenth century. He was among the first Europeans to cross large parts of Africa, driven by a passionate desire to end the slave trade. He believed that by opening up the continent he could expose slavery for the evil it was.
When he died in 1873, he was loved in both Africa and Britain. His African companions buried his heart in Africa and then carried his body for months to the coast, so that it could be returned to Britain. He was given a hero's funeral and laid to rest in Westminster Abbey.
Yet it is easy to focus on Livingstone the saint and forget that he was an ordinary human being with ordinary struggles. Before he found his life's work, he ran into many dead ends.
He trained as a doctor hoping to serve as a medical missionary in China, but by the time his training was complete, the First Opium War had closed that door.
Instead, inspired by the missionary Robert Moffat, he was sent to southern Africa. Moffat had spoken movingly of seeing the smoke of a thousand villages where no missionary had ever been. When Livingstone arrived at Moffat's mission at Kuruman in 1841, he found the work much slower and the region far less populated than he had imagined, and the number of converts was small.
Livingstone set out to establish mission stations of his own further north. Over the following years his work produced few lasting results. His best-known convert, Chief Sechele, lapsed for a time, which was a deep disappointment to him.
These setbacks led Livingstone to rethink his calling. Only after years of disappointment did he begin the great journeys of exploration that made his name.
He also had real flaws. Although he related well to many Africans, he often found it hard to get on with fellow Europeans. He clashed with other missionaries, fellow explorers and assistants, and even with his own brother, Charles. He could hold grudges and lose his temper, and eventually he parted ways with the London Missionary Society that had first sent him.
Livingstone's story reminds us that God's work is done by ordinary, flawed people, not supersaints. And it shows that we move into the future one step at a time. Where we will end up is often unclear, and there may be many detours, but if we stay faithful to what matters most, God can use us.
Takeaway: God's priorities for our lives often become clear only after detours and disappointments. Faithfulness in the small steps matters more than seeing the whole road.
Source: Biographical accounts of David Livingstone.
Alexander Graham Bell and the Patent That Nearly Wasn't
Almost every home today has a telephone, and many of us carry one in our pocket. Most people could tell you who invented it: Alexander Graham Bell.
Bell was enormously talented. Besides the telephone, he worked on a wide range of inventions, from improvements to the telegraph to devices for testing hearing. He helped found the journal Science, served as president of the National Geographic Society and spent much of his life working with deaf people.
But he is most famous for the telephone, which made his family very wealthy. And he very nearly lost it.
Bell was cautious about filing a patent. His backer, Gardiner Hubbard, who later became his father-in-law, arranged for Bell's lawyer to file the application at the US Patent Office on 14 February 1876, apparently without Bell knowing it was being submitted that day.
On the same day, a few hours apart, a lawyer for the inventor Elisha Gray filed a notice of his own design for a telephone. The question of who came first was fought over in the courts for years, but Bell's patent stood.
The story reminds us that great ideas are not enough. Sometimes what matters most is acting on them before the moment passes. It also shows how much we need each other: the thinker who dreams up the idea, and the doer who makes sure something happens.
Takeaway: Good intentions are not enough; sometimes we must act. "Faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead" (James 2:17).
Source: Historical accounts of the Bell–Gray telephone controversy.
"Are You Being a Good Citizen?": A Doctor's Question
A story told about a Canadian country doctor; we have not been able to confirm its details independently, so we share it as it is usually told.
Dr Jim Langstaff, the story goes, was a Canadian doctor in the early twentieth century who was known for his extraordinary devotion to his patients.
One bitterly cold winter's day, he heard that a woman on an isolated farm was about to give birth and urgently needed medical help. The roads had become impassable, but he set off anyway.
When his car could go no further, he strapped on his skis and carried on. Snowdrifts on the road made skiing too hard, so he took to the fields beside it. At one point he tripped over a fence and became badly tangled in the wire.
He freed himself, pressed on to the farmhouse and delivered the baby. Only when the weather had cleared did he make his way back to his car.
People who knew him said that kind of dedication was typical. It came from a strong sense of his place in the world and his duty to others.
One day, his son Walter came to him, bursting with pride. Dad, he said, I got ninety-nine per cent in maths on my report card!
That's great, his father replied. But are you being a good citizen?
Decades later, the question still challenged Walter. He said he had remembered that remark for forty-five years, and kept asking himself: was he being a good citizen?
Achievement matters. But Dr Langstaff's question points to something more important: not just how well we do, but how well we serve.
Takeaway: Jesus said that the greatest among us will be the servant of all (Mark 9:35). Good grades and great careers matter less than the kind of people we become.
Source: Widely retold story; original source unconfirmed.
The Space Race: A Giant Leap, and a Hard Question
On the evening of 20 July 1969, people all over the world crowded around black-and-white television sets, holding their breath as they watched grainy images from space. Those without televisions went to neighbours who had one. No one wanted to miss it.
The atmosphere was thick with excitement and nervous tension. Then, just before eleven o'clock at night on the American east coast, Neil Armstrong stepped from the lunar module onto the surface of the Moon and spoke the famous words, “That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”
Reaching the Moon was a phenomenal achievement. It was a sign of the great things human beings can do. But from another angle, it also revealed something less flattering about us.
Eight years earlier, in April 1961, the Soviet Union had launched Yuri Gagarin into orbit around the Earth, the first human being ever to travel into space. In the middle of the Cold War, that moment stung the United States. Determined not to be beaten again, the country made reaching the Moon first a national priority and poured enormous resources into the space race.
Why did it matter so much to be first? In large part, the race to the Moon was a race for prestige. It was a contest to show which nation had the greatest know-how, the best scientists and the most advanced technology, and which system, capitalism or communism, was superior.
The cost was immense. A 1974 report to a committee of the US House of Representatives put the cost of the Apollo programme at around 25.4 billion dollars, which would be many times that amount in today's money.
Some people asked hard questions at the time. The Christian singer-songwriter Larry Norman, for example, wrote a song criticising America for spending so much to reach the Moon while so many people on Earth went hungry.
Space exploration has brought real benefits, and many would argue it was worth every cent. But the story invites us to ask what drives our own priorities. Are we spending our time and money on what truly matters, or on winning the races that make us look good?
Takeaway: "For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also" (Matthew 6:21). Our spending reveals our priorities.
Source: NASA history; US House of Representatives subcommittee report (1974).
Final thoughts
A jar of rocks, a letter home, a coach's tribute, a missionary's detours, a patent filed just in time, a doctor on skis and a race to the Moon. Each asks the same question: what will we put first?
For further reading, Sopranu reviews Cal Newport's So Good They Can't Ignore You and asks what makes a good life.
What is one big rock you need to put into your week before anything else?
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These stories are retold in our own words for teaching and reflection. Sources are credited under each story.