Staring into the review mirror causes front end crashes

Consider these words of wisdom
Prov. 3.5-7 … Trust in the LORD with all your heart, and do not rely on your own understanding. Acknowledge him in all your ways, and he will make your paths straight. Do not be wise in your own estimation; fear the LORD and turn away from evil.
Psalm 27.11 … Teach me your way, O LORD, and lead me on a level path
Psalm 143.10 … Teach me to do your will, for you are my God! Let your good Spirit lead me on level ground!
Proverbs 15.14 … The discerning heart seeks knowledge, but the mouth of fools feeds on folly
With the above in mind ...
In Wednesday’s video I talked about:

1. Invest in yourself … Pick something and go with it
2. Accept the daily grind but … know it leads to great moments - those moments should involve others
   1. Come to know that you are investing in yourself to be whole - healthy in mind, body, strength, and mind so that you can enable others to do the same with their lives. Couple this with faith, and it is one idea of a Godly life. 

Meaning (your “why” and “what does it all mean?)
I don’t know where you are in your life in terms of “headspace” with how you are living your life - or how you want to be living your life. Some of you may be satisfied with your life, many of you are not. To those of you who are content, I would pray that you begin to look at your community and ask yourself who you can help that does not have their lives “all together.” Chances are, you know someone that could use a little guidance, will not ask for it, and won’t accept your offer. I would say begin to ask this person, people, family, couple, etc out once a month just to get to know them. After a while, you’ll find your influence begins to passively affect them, and soon opportunities will come for you to minister or help them. 

For myself, I have been dissatisfied with who I am until only recently and am finding that four areas that needed some investing were family, faith, fitness, and finance. Today I’m just going to briefly talk about what I had to do in these areas to make myself feel like my life was getting on track. Another way of saying this, is that I decided to develop daily habits into a system that made things easier for me to grow 1% every day into the person that I desired to be. 
​

• Family (Belonging, Success, and Purpose/Destiny)
  • This past year has been very hard going through my divorce and realizing … all the things that I’ve realized; they were many. The biggest thing I learned was that I was investing too much into my future (and failing by the way) and not being present enough with my now ex-wife. I know all the cliches, but what this all boils down to is to simply “be present” with your family. I will also add this: your family is your family. You may have a “bad” family, it is up to you, through trust and faith in the love of God, to be the example of forgiveness and grace. Your family can heal, and every time you choose your friends to be your family you are choosing wrong. Ask anyone who is dying.

• Faith (Origin/Identity Tough Questions and gray areas)
  • This past year I realized quite a bit about grace. It is a classic case of “teaching from the head, and now from the heart.” 

• Fitness (Theology of the Body, Morality, Mental Health)
  • When I speak about fitness I am not just talking about exercising but caring for your bodies, this includes sexual ethics. Porn destroys your brain and one of the basic things that it does is increase grey matter in your brain and makes decision making harder for guys. This idea of grey areas and grey matter relates to faith, because while there are more questions than answers with faith, it becomes even more complicated with you are - quite literally - not in your right mind

• Finance (Generosity and Contentment)
  • Finally, it was high time I got out of debt … again. I have learned quite a great deal about finances that I should have picked up earlier. I could blame teachers and the school system … oh wait - I do! But in reality, with YouTube and other resources there really is no excuse not to be good with money and debt in our present culture. It also is a tool - and I was a “tool” in how wasteful I was with my money, and this caused so much pain and distraction from the important things. I was focused on making money, rather than making time with others the most important thing.

With these realizations and a lot of journaling and thinking on things I decided it was time to do something about things rather than just constantly repeat the same “song” in my head about my past. As the saying goes, the windshield is much bigger than the review mirror; possibilities exist ahead, not behind. 

I thank God for His grace and leading in my life every day, and am constantly learning to live a life of gratitude within His grace. These are the things that I have focused on in order to move forward. I do a little in each area and will be sharing much of what I have been reading and experiencing. My encouragement for you is to continue to follow me (😎), but mostly to make the resolution within yourself to always learn. If you always want to learn, you will create a growth mindset and look more ahead than back with your life. There are so many things to experience, why waste time reliving the past, which you cannot change? What you can change is your mindset today to live into tomorrow with hope and excitement. 

Make sure you TUNE IN to the Sermon on Sunday at 9:00a, or better yet, join us if you’re close by! Next sunday we’re talking about Testimony, what is it and why does it matter?