Tag Archives: Personal Growth

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The First Step to Find Your Life Direction

Start by Figuring Out Your Strengths

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What are you good at? Isn’t that the classic question people ask you when you’re trying to figure out your life direction? It’s not a bad question, but it’s not enough. We need to start by figuring out our strengths.

It took me five years to figure out my strengths. It doesn’t have to take you that long.

I worked it in between running a school, getting my MBA, and engaging a family of five or six–however many kids we had at the time. I didn’t get intentional about it, partly because I didn’t get to it until later in life.

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The Fifth Secret You Need to Know About God’s Will

If We Trust God with Eternity, Why Do We Worry about Today?

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Ask just about any Christian if he or she trusts God to take them to heaven to live with Him forever, and you’ll get an immediate and resounding yes. So why do those same Christians – myself included – struggle to trust Him with all the stuff in between here and now and there and then?

Paying bills, making life decisions, navigating relationships, avoiding temptation – you name it, we worry about it. We fret about stuff we have no control over. We lose sleep trying to make sure we’ve thought of every contingency. We exhaust ourselves working to get just one more thing done or to make a few dollars more.

And then we say we trust God with the fate of our souls. Hmmm…..

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9 Ways Truth Causes Faith to Thrive

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In spite of recent events and rulings by the United States Supreme Court, truth still matters for those seeking to live authentic lives of abundant faith. When our beliefs are focused rightly, faith can move us to live a story worth telling. But when our faith falls for propaganda, our story inevitably suffers for it.

When our faith falls for propaganda, our story inevitably suffers for it.

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Os Guinness, author of A Free People’s Suicide: Sustainable Freedom and the American Future, says this about attempts to find freedom apart from truth:

The sad fact is that without truth and virtue, those who proclaim freedom and set out to do what they like often end up not liking what they have done.

Truth causes faith to thrive, while propaganda always destroys in spite of false hope, good feelings, and the best of intentions.

Yet how often do we engage the source of truth? Jesus himself said that the Word is truth. It claims to have all we need to equip us while out on the trail following Him. But do we use it?

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Do You Have What It Takes to Be A Hero?

5 Key Questions to Identify Your Core Beliefs

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Sacrifice. It’s not a popular word. It never has been and probably never will be. But to those who desire an authentic life, the kind of life that produces a story worth telling, sacrifice must become a way of life. Faith is the stuff heroes are made of.

This past weekend in America, we celebrated Memorial Day. We set aside a day to remember the fallen, those brave men and woman who served in our Armed Forces and gave their last measure of full devotion — but why did they do it?

I would suggest most did it because of what they believed to be true, most definitely in spite of what they saw, sensed, or felt. For readers of my new book A Story Worth Telling, that explanation should sound familiar — it is the very definition of faith.

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Why My Book Launch Will Fail — And That’s OK

How Do You Define Success When Walking by Faith?

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I don’t know about you, but I hate to fail. I hate it with a passion. The feeling that I have fallen short of the goal – even a goal I’ve set in my own mind – has to be one of the worst feelings ever.

It happens every time I set aside a day for yard work. I conjure up a long list of things to accomplish. But no matter how much I actually accomplish in the day, it’s never enough. The list is always longer than the day.

Solomon put it this way: “Just as Death and Destruction are never satisfied, so human desire is never satisfied.” (Prov. 27:20)

Yep. That would be me. Never satisfied.

Sometimes the Truth Hurts

Can I be brutally candid with you about the launch of my new book? I think it will fail to meet my expectations. Here’s why.

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What Writing a Book Taught Me

6 Lessons I Learned from Writing a Book about Faith

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I had always dreamed of writing a book. I know, some of you are thinking, I have that same dream while others are thinking, Who needs yet another book?

I empathize with both of you, actually. Now that I’ve written several books, both by myself and with others, the process isn’t nearly as mysterious as it once was. But it is not an easy task — at least not to write something someone will find worth reading.

Along this journey to write A Story Worth Telling: Your Field Guide to Living an Authentic Life, I examined every passage of Scripture referencing faith, belief, or trust. You name it, I’ve probably dismantled it.

And then to tackle such a topic that people much smarter than me have written about for centuries — well, it was a bit intimidating at times.

But the greater challenge was managing my time.

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What Everybody Ought to Know About Faith

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One thing I’ve learned on this journey to live a story worth telling is that living by faith is more of a process than an event. Even the most passionate Christ-follower is tempted to settle, to find a safe place where faith doesn’t seem quite so necessary for survival.

The good news is this: God will not let His children settle. For when we settle, we cease to trust. When we cease to trust, we fail to please God.

When we settle, we cease to trust. When we cease to trust, we fail to please God.

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We Were Made for Adventure

God’s first instruction to us at Creation was to be fruitful and multiply, to fill the earth and subdue it. It was a command to keep moving forward alongside Him, to always be seeking the next adventure. He repeated the command to Noah and his family after The Great Flood.

And yet what do we see within a few generations but an effort to settle down instead of stepping up. In a place that came to be called Babel, they said: “Let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be dispersed over the face of the whole earth.” (Genesis 11:4)

Even though the rest of the world lay unexplored, they chose to settle. They pulled back in fear instead of stepping out with courageous faith. They chose to consolidate their own power so they wouldn’t need to trust in God. Or so they thought.

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Why You Need Not Fear Being Afraid

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My friend Dan Nichols recently wrote a post identifying fear as the greatest threat to leadership. It got me thinking. I agree that fear keeps many people from living a story worth telling, but it doesn’t have to if we make fear our friend.

None of us enjoy feeling that our story might not turn out the way we want it to. Fear is what we feel when we sense we’ve lost control, when we’re uncertain about what might happen next. When we don’t know how things are going to turn out, we feel fears icy grip tighten around our soul.

But fear is not all bad. In fact, out of our control is what we should be feeling — it is the reality in which we live. When circumstances bring us face-to-face with this reality, we have a choice: let our fear control us, or see it as an opportunity to live a more authentic life.

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The Greatest Risk You Face Right Now

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What if the greatest risk you face isn’t what you think?

If we listed our current top five fears (or does concerns sound like more acceptable Christianeze?), I suspect most of us would have lists like this:

  • Will I have enough money?
  • Will that relationship work out?
  • Will I find healing for this physical body I’m stuck with?
  • Will the right people like and accept me?
  • Will anyone find out that I’m actually an idiot?

Well, maybe some of us don’t worry about that last one as much as we should. But the reality is this: all but one of those fears is already in the process of fading away. The Apostle Paul said it best:

The things which are seen are temporary, but the things which are not seen are eternal. 2 Corinthians 4:18

For FaithWalkers, only relationships will last beyond our brief tour of this earth. And even those often come and go throughout our brief stay. How many of us lived our high school and college years consumed with what our peers thought of us – only to seldom, if ever, see them once we passed that season of life?