Tag: life

Looking Out the Well

Silence as a writer builds up. As it builds up, its paralyzing. The last two years have made it worse. Even though I felt things welling up inside me to write, I stayed silent. I was scared, and there were voices that were already saying what I was feeling. So, I figured I didn’t need to just be another voice. I could just listen and be encouraged that someone else was stepping up to the plate. In some ways, I was content to watch from the sidelines. However, I still felt like my silence was somehow wrong.

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Trading Fear for Gratitude

Sometimes, I have problems getting to sleep. At night, something happens in my brain. The wheels start turning. They typically turn about the same thing. What happens after all of this ends? When is my time up? What will it be like? I don’t want to leave family and friends behind. What if its just darkness? How will it feel? How did I feel before I existed?

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We All Can Change

The movie Rocky 4 is a parable. At its surface level, its got some pretty nationalistic overtones. Its America vs the Soviet Union. Rocky trains all natural, and the Russian gets loaded up with steroids and has the top of the line equipment. However, when you go just below surface level (and not very far below because the movie really isn’t that subtle) it is a parable about change.

Toward the beginning of the movie, Rocky has an interaction with his old rival Apollo Creed. Apollo accepted a boxing match with the Russian villain of the film, Ivan Drago. Rocky asks Creed, “Do you think your not going into this fight with this Russian?”

Apollo responds, “If not him then who is it against?!”

“Well, don’t you think maybe its more you against you?” Rocky asks. This question hits the nail right on the head for Apollo and for many of us, and Apollo brushes it off. He responds defensively like most of us would, “Maybe you really are brain damaged,” he says to Rocky. Apollo goes on to defend his stance: they are warriors. It is how they were born. They can’t change.

Apollo goes into the fight against Drago and loses his life. Rocky then sets out on a journey to avenge Apollo in which his wife echos the same concern for Rocky as Rocky did Apollo. Rocky remembers that conversation with Apollo, and there may even be a hint of guilt. If only he had stood his ground a little firmer, would his friend still be alive? So, he convinces himself that Apollo was right – he can’t change.

What he finds while training and while fighting was the hard truth – change is possible. However, change isn’t easy. Change requires guts but no glory. Rocky’s speech at the end of the movie drives the point home.

We all can change. What is in your life that you have felt a tug that needs to change, however you just don’t believe you can?

Reaching in Small Goals

Vision is a great thing to have. It is a great thing to have an overarching goal; something to strive for. However, there needs to be little mini goals that work as sign posts along the way. Let me give an example:

This weekend, I am getting ready to stuff envelopes full of invitations for my wedding. The guest list is pretty beefy, and there will be around 200 invitations to send or pass out to people. That is a lot of mail.

I could stack those invitations up and just try and rip the bandaid off. However, I know for a fact that this is discouraging and tiresome. The further down I get in the mail pile, it seems to carry the illusion that it is actually growing. My brain begins to ask, “When will this end?!”

However, if I divide the mailing up into groups of 10 then I am down to something more manageable. 10 invitations seem easier to stuff. To send 100 invitations out, I just need to have 10 groupings. All of the sudden, things do not seem quite as overwhelming.

Add the help of friends on to this, and suddenly invitation stuffing doesn’t seem nearly as intimidating.

This goes with any goal in life. Set a big goal, as you have probably heard before, reach for the stars! Then set smaller goals, develop a plan, and with each goal you achieve you can feel a sense of accomplishment instead of feeling defeated that you aren’t even half way to where you wish you were.

Fear – The Enemy of Purpose

In the road to discovering and living out our gifting, we must tackle our fear. Fear keeps us from doing too many things in life. It keeps many of us from doing what we want to do and what we are called to do. I’m not going to bore you with statistics, because I have found they don’t really provide me much inspiration. A friend of mine described statistics as an average. At best they are a baseline to provide perspective. At worst, they are just numbers designed to scare people.

Instead, think about how many people you know who have graduated college with a degree that they don’t use in their job. What about you? Are you doing what you went to school for? Why did you go to school? Did you go to school simply to learn things that would provide stability? I was a creative writing major, so you know I’m not banking on my degree to provide any kind of stability, and I don’t really use it from 8-5 on Monday through Friday.

Over time, I’ve found this this to be true regarding why I haven’t pursued the things in life worth pursuing: Safety provides comfortability. Living requires transparency. That is scary.

This is true both professionally and with relationships. If you want to be married someday, you have to date. If you are a guy, that means stepping up to the plate and asking a girl out. This also means taking a chance on someone who may not be 100% put together. I’m not saying to sacrifice the things that are important, but create a good list of “must-haves”. Both of these things require some amount of inventory and a lot of transparency. If we have a shallow list, then we have to ask ourselves why. If we are pursuing the wrong people and wrong things, we have to ask ourselves why.

It is scary to take an honest look at ourselves. With gifting, we may want to be gifted in one area, but God has created us with a completely different gifting. Through our own past circumstances, we may also feel like we aren’t gifted at all. This is an outright lie, especially if you have made a decision to follow Jesus. Lets look at a couple of reasons why:

“4 I always thank my God for you because of his grace given you in Christ Jesus. 5 For in him you have been enriched in every way—with all kinds of speech and with all knowledge— 6 God thus confirming our testimony about Christ among you. 7 Therefore you do not lack any spiritual gift as you eagerly wait for our Lord Jesus Christ to be revealed.” – 1 Corinthians 1:4-7

If we choose to follow God, we make ourselves available to be used for His purposes. God does not waste anything. When you choose to follow Christ, you open yourself up to being, “enriched in every way–with all kinds of speech and with all knowledge.”  This is not for our own gain, though, but it is for the specific purpose God has created us for as Paul wrote in his letter to the Ephesians:

“For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.” – Ephesians 2:10

God has prepared work for us in advance to do. The work is there. He made us for a purpose, and if we choose to follow Him then we may fulfill that purpose.

So then what do we do with fear?  Again, we can look at Paul’s letters and read, “If God is for us, who can be against us?” If we work within our gifting, God will make good use of it. The God who made the heavens and the earth created us this way.

With God on our side, lets destroy fear and dive deep into what His purpose for you me is.