Category: personal growth

  • Real Talk Missing In The Church

    Real Talk Missing In The Church

    There’s so much real talk missing in the church. I think that’s because there are vacant societal roles we haven’t popularized yet.

    We have preachers and teachers who talk doctrine and scripture and faith, and we have business people who talk strategies and innovations and principles.

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  • What Does It Look Like to Be There For Someone?

    What does it mean to actually “be there” for someone? We often check in and ask questions like:

    “How’s it going?”

    “How are you?”

    “How can I help?”

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  • Have You Tried to Mind Game Yourself Into Your Destiny?

    So you don’t believe you have a destiny… Got it. Probably not the ideal article for you to read, then. It won’t hurt my feelings if you tune out. For those of you who DO or who MIGHT think you have a destiny, I’m talking to you.

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  • Are You Constantly Disappointed? You’re Doing It Wrong

    If a planet killer asteroid is headed toward you, do you follow the rules that will cost you your life? Or do you break from protocol to save the world?

    Life is too short to waste on continuously dreaming impossible dreams.

    To camp out in the land of disappointed, deferred hope is suicide.

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  • One of the Easiest Ways to Impact Children’s Lives

    One of the easiest ways for adults to have a greater impact on a child’s sense of self value:Speak up with your affirmation even if others already have.
     
    Just because another adult praises a child for their accomplishment or expresses delight in a child’s effort doesn’t mean the role has been filled. The child wants and needs affirmation from EACH influential adult in their lives.
     

  • Words Don’t Always Mean What We Think They Mean

    Pop culture wields amazing power. Words often take on new meanings due to popular use, and their meanings evolve over generations to match the current mindset of the people. We think we know what we’re saying, but do we really?

    It’s important to call attention to assumptions, though, because we build entire thought processes and philosophies upon the supposed meanings of words. Your entire life is shaped by the decisions you make based on what you believe words to mean.

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  • Are You Avoiding Conflict or Honoring Your Time?

    In the course of pursuing the destiny for which you were created, you have no doubt already experienced a conflict you chosen not to engage. Some will accuse you of being inflexible or refusing to be challenged. And it might be true.

    At the same time, it may be patently false. How easy to misconstrue the responses of others!

    How much self-examination is too much?

    At some point, you can’t continue to question everything. Questioning is a different mode than building, and if you never start building, you end up with nothing to show for your life. So at what point do you draw a line and say “No more questioning. I’m moving on”?

    There is a time to tear down. And a time to build up. Wisdom is discerning when you’ve done enough demolition and examination and then choosing to transition to building and development.

    Perhaps in projects that last generations, a person might devote their entire life to one mode: to tear down a sacred calf of the mind or to build a supporting structure for a much greater project for the generations who follow. But for many, if not most, parts of life, we have a duty to contribute something. To create something. To do so, one must abandon constant scrutiny and self-examination at some point. Otherwise the work never gets started.

    There are times I’ve had little patience for people whose only contributions to my life incite conflict. Not because I fear or shun conflict, but because conflict is all they ever bring to the table. The first conflict or two are fine. They are coincidental. But when a pattern emerges, a choice must be made.

    Do I spend my energy and time on this person who only seems to contribute when they disagree with me? Are they open to debate? Is our relationship built upon give and take? Or is it based on imbalance?

    A person whose only contribution to a relationship is conflict has not earned the time to have their ideas continually considered and discussed. Time is one of our most finite resources and we must each determine how to spend it.

    Healthy relationships top the list of priorities.

     


  • Don’t Let Other People Tell You Who You Are

    I share my stories with you in case you’ve experienced something like it. You’re not alone. And we CAN get through this.

    A few months after I gave my life to Jesus, people started prophesying over me at various church gatherings. Then after I completed the church membership classes, a few leaders in the church prophesied over me. 

    I started collecting these statements and promises, but really had no clue what to do with them. In some ways those words made my life worse. They tortured me. I was destined for something great, and yet I was a cowardly, insecure young man with no sense of direction for my life.

    Looking back, it hurts to consider that possibly some of the words received were just plain wrong. Maybe they were for someone else. Maybe they were misinterpreted. But what if the confusion I’ve felt paralyzed by for so long is the result of giving these prophecies the power to shape my life?

    What if most of the prophetic words spoken over me were flesh or just in error?What if my life feels so out of sync because I let other people tell me who I am. Instead of telling the world who I am. Or asking Father who he says I am.
    What if some of these crucial prophetic words from two decades ago mean nothing because they never confirmed much about my current or past life and therefore should be judged much more critically?

    One of the best personal philosophies I have I got from nonbelieving entrepreneurs. And that philosophy is that I don’t have to wait for life to choose me. I can choose life and make it happen. And I really didn’t know that for most of my life.

    It’s possible to feel an obligation to seek out, wait for, or work really hard to make prophecies come true. But when there’s a heart disconnect, allowing yourself to be limited by the parameters of a personal prophesy seems destructive. You are who God made you far more than you are what Joe Blow has the maturity and clarity to hear from God about you. 

    If the prophecy is in error, it has the potential to weigh us down just as much as other people’s opinions or curses. Trying to live up to the wrong ideal is soul crushing.

    I’m tired of confusion and error. I’m tired of floating through life. I’m ready to swim.


  • How Do You Know if You’re Working to Live or Living to Work?

    How Do You Know if You’re Working to Live or Living to Work?

    It’s one of the worst kept secrets in American culture. While we frown upon obesity and addiction, we often praise workaholics and treat them as the heroes of the 21st Century. 

    Workaholism is a vice. It’s an unhealthy imbalance. Yet how many Prime Time tv series focus on a doctor, lawyer, or detective who works late into the night every night, to the detriment of their families? It’s become the most cliche character type in our day. 

    Most of us will never be doctors. We’ll never be detectives. And we’ll definitely never be lawyers. But we watch these shows because we live vicariously through the dramatized excitement of their professions. Careers where lives hang in the balance every single day. It makes the mundane workday seem so exciting. You can never phone it in because someone needs surgery or an acquittal.

    None of it’s real, of course. Those are our tv lives. Whether we answer phones, write code, take blood samples, or balance accounts, our day to day work is often the stuff that daydreams are formed to escape from. 

    There’s a growing number of bored and unchallenged employees who’ve become fans of real-life entrepreneurs. Mythical business heroes like Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Sergey Brin, Gary Vaynerchuk, and Mark Zuckerburg. These people rose from the ranks of everyday high school and college students and took big risks that paid off years down the road. And we who are stuck in jobs we don’t like doing work that doesn’t fulfill us look to those people and live vicariously through them. Just like I imagine teenage girls live through the constant tweets and shows and articles on the Kardashians. 

    I don’t track the everyday nature of most entrepreneur’s lives, but I know many of them work nonstop from dawn til dusk. They rarely if ever take vacations. They’re driven to arrive at a destination they’ve envisioned. 

    I’m not saying don’t learn from them. I’m not even saying don’t emulate them. I just question where the line is. You know… That line where temporary hard work to achieve a major goal blurs over into working long and hard all the time as the definition and destination of one’s life. 


  • Waiting For Permission

    Have you ever waited to be noticed for weeks, months, maybe even years, only it never happened? Maybe it was a promotion at work. Or maybe it was for the cute barista at the coffee shop to finally make eye contact. Or to be invited into a group you’d watched from the outside. Maybe it was a life calling that would break you out of the mold of mediocrity and finally place you where you always knew you belonged.

    I remember the faces of dozens of friends and acquaintances in their early 20s who tread water in their minimum wage jobs for years as they waited for God to initiate some sort of revival movement that would sweep them off their feet and make the rest of their humdrum lives unimportant and unnecessary. I was one of those people. If ONLY we pressed into prayer, intercession, and worship with more sincerity and passion, we would surely tip the scales and miracles, prophecy, and physical manifestations of God’s power would roll over the earth like a tide.

    Dealing with disappointment

    Then it didn’t happen. Then it didn’t happen again. Then it didn’t happen a third time. You get the picture. Something between my expectations and reality didn’t mesh. I was waiting for something that didn’t happen. And it wrecked me. Really wrecked me.

    When your expectation of life is to see healings and signs and wonders every day and instead you feel like your prayers are fizzling out before they reach the target, it’s not long before Depression lies at the door, knocking.

    What’s Plan B?

    The first problem was that I didn’t have a backup plan. I had connected dots in my mind that weren’t connected by God. And in this imagined reality, all commerce essentially would halt and people would walk the streets in an unrestrained atmosphere of glory and majesty. I had read books about the Welsh revival. Azusa street. And more. I don’t know what all these other Christians are waiting for, but I’m willing to be the guy who ushers this back in again. 

    The problem with planning on an unrestrained revival is that you’ve made no plans to earn a living. Or develop skills. Or form a family. None of these meager earthly things have been accounted for. So when revival fails to show, guess what? Depression it is!

    Are you crazy or eccentric?

    There’s a bitter culture shock that comes with realizing that everything you’ve planned on life being about is out of order and that you have wasted valuable time that should have been spent honing skills and practicing presence.

    Oftentimes the difference between crazy and eccentric is the degree of wealth and success that result. If you bank your whole life on a risky investment and it pays off, you’re a genius. If it doesn’t, you’re a fool. I felt like a fool.

    You never know what the end result will be before you start. The choice to act now comes with all kinds of risk.

    • What if you choose the wrong path?
    • What if you act at the wrong time?
    • What if the right path was going to present itself to you a month from now and you’ll miss it if you get distracted with this now?

    The gurus and the ad agencies will tell you to JUST DO IT. And they’re not wrong. But they’re not always right. Sometimes action would be the hasty choice. I think it all depends on what type of person you are, and what your motivation would be to NOT “do”. What do you gain by inaction?

    • Sometimes we wait to hide from pain and risk.
    • Sometimes we wait because we fear our motives.
    • Sometimes we wait because the choice is unclear.
    • Sometimes we wait because we don’t know what we want.

    I’ve waited for each and every one of these. But now, as I approach 40, I realize that I could have chosen to GO at every moment and it would all end up okay. In moments of uncertainty, action isn’t the enemy. You can press forward toward a temporary goal with an open heart and a willingness to be course-corrected mid-trip. I think that’s the answer. Bill Leckie used to call it “Ready? Fire. Aim.” It means action and motion and willingness and flexibility. Momentum is often achieved before the destination is visible.

    You can’t steer a ship that’s anchored. Steering only takes effect when there is motion.