Fearlessly Courageous
Desk of Dennis Piller
9 11 2026
Occupied With What?
You wake up early. No reason. You sit in that predawn darkness and whisper a prayer or two.
You close your eyes and ponder God and His presence.
The quiet. The peace.
You reach for your phone, thinking about a Bible app or a Scripture. You read for a minute, and then you start scrolling for another song or something else. And before you know it, you get caught up in a string of short feeds that draw you away.
Nothing violent. Nothing adventurous. Nothing fast-moving. Just one short feed after another, after another…
and thirty minutes are simply gone.
And we’re off.
The morning sunrise has passed, and it’s time to meet the world of making a living.
Occupied with life.
We all have some form of checklist every day, don’t we? Some routine we’ve become comfortable with. Things that need to be done. Things we have to do. Things we’ve always done.
What is that for you?
When was the last time you stopped and did an audit? An honest assessment of what occupies your life?
Occupied with what?
Isn’t life about asking better questions—and then drilling down for the best answers? Eternal or temporal? What are my deposits from the onset? Not buckets, but seeds. What else, beyond God, is truly eternal?
What seeds are you investing today? Not just on Sunday, but on each of the days between Sundays?
Isn’t it amazing how, as much as we sometimes like—and sometimes don’t like—the silence of being alone, we gravitate toward the noise? The busy. Something to occupy us. Sometimes, sadly, almost anything that will hold our focus.
Occupied with nothing meaningful.
Seeds of what? Every day we are planting something. Some seeds will grow into things that are temporary. Some will produce things that have eternal significance. And often, we don’t even realize what we are planting because we are simply living the life we have become accustomed to living.
We find ourselves caught in a circle—a gerbil wheel of living. Caught. Stuck. Entrenched in a routine that may be good, neutral, or even bad, but we have become comfortable in it. And because it is familiar, we rarely stop to ask where it is taking us.
Occupied with what?
Seeds of what?
There is nothing wrong with working. Working is necessary. Providing is good. Saving for retirement is wise. Building some security and wanting peace and comfort in the later years of our lives is not wrong.
But what happens when the seeds of achieving become greater than the seeds of eternity?
What happens when building a comfortable life quietly becomes more important than fulfilling our eternal purpose for living?
What happens when the things that were supposed to serve our lives begin to direct our lives?
Stuck? Maybe. Entrenched in the paths we have dug? For sure.
And that is what makes this so difficult to recognize. We can be sincerely trying to do the right things and still become distracted, derailed, or slowly headed in the wrong direction.
Not because we intended to leave God. But because life got busy.
Because responsibilities grew. Because the routine became comfortable. Because we kept planting the same seeds without stopping to ask what they were going to produce.
Occupied with what?
The Bible and the Holy Spirit are there to grow us into the image of Jesus. The Holy Spirit is indeed the mighty power of God. But first, He must teach us to see, desire, and believe the exceeding greatness of God’s power toward us and in us.
Paul prayed that we would be strengthened with might by His Spirit in our inner man, that Christ would dwell in our hearts through faith, and that we would be rooted and grounded in love. He prayed that we might be filled with all the fullness of God. (Ephesians 3:16–19)
Think about that. Filled with the fullness of God.
What would happen if that became more than a Scripture we read and became something we were actually
occupied with receiving?
We are filled by reading and receiving the love and power of His Word. We grow in faith. We begin to understand the promises of the Father of glory and what He desires to do in us and through us according to the riches of His glory.
So what seeds are we planting?
Seeds of His glory. Seeds of faith. Seeds of obedience. Seeds of love. Seeds of eternal purpose. Seeds laid upon the foundation of Jesus—the Rock and Cornerstone—not seeds scattered on the sand.
And then Paul gives us one of the most staggering conclusions in all of Scripture:
“Now unto him that is able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that worketh in us, unto him be glory…” (Ephesians 3:20–21)
According to the power that works in us. Wasn’t that Paul’s standard for the New Testament life? Is it ours?
Or are we occupied with what?
Paul’s standard was not simply that we believe God exists. It was that we believe God with our whole heart and soul—that we yield our lives to Him and become available to what He wants to do in us and through us.
Does that inspire our life commitment? Does that sound like the grandest thing there is in the universe? And isn’t it our responsibility to be occupied with receiving the strengthening of His power according to the riches of His glory?
I think God waits to do it. But the question is:
Who will wait to receive it?
Who will slow down long enough to hear Him? Who will examine the seeds they are planting? Who will recognize that good intentions are not always the same thing as eternal direction?
Who will yield himself, like Paul, to become an instrument and an intercessor for God? Maybe the question God wants to reverberate inside each of us today is very simple:
Occupied with what?
What gets the best of your attention?
What gets the best of your time?
What gets your mental energy when no one is watching?
What are you planting because you have to?
What are you planting because you’re comfortable?
What are you planting simply because it has become your routine?
And then, perhaps the most important question:
What will those seeds produce? Have you looked lately? What have you been occupied with?
Because every day we are planting something. Every conversation. Every hour. Every choice. Every quiet moment. Every distraction. Every act of obedience. Every moment we choose to seek Him instead of simply filling the silence. We are planting.
The question is not whether we are planting.
The question is: What are we planting?
And ultimately…
What are we occupied with?
May we become occupied with His purpose.
Occupied with His presence. Occupied with His Word.
Occupied with the indwelling of His eternal power and glory—fully accessible through the power that lives and works in us.
And may the seeds we plant today become something that reaches far beyond today.
And today Friday, September 11, we will pause again to remember a day that changed our nation. Thousands of people woke up that morning with plans, routines, responsibilities, and things that occupied their minds. They had no idea how quickly life could change. Perhaps that is one of the quiet reminders of 9/11: we are not promised tomorrow, but we are given today. So what will occupy us today? What seeds will we plant today? What will matter when everything temporary is stripped away?
Pray for their families today and our nation.
And may the seeds we plant today become something that reaches far beyond today.
Something eternal.
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