I heard someone say today "Pastors often lose sight of who they are."
I think to some extent that may be true- especially for those of us who tend towards the co-dependant. Being driven more by who we feel others want us to be.
But I think it might be more precise to say we often become people we didn't intend to be. And we do so by living reactively- taking each day as it comes, dealing with the facts (and fires) on the ground, avoiding the 50,000 foot view altogether.
And the 50,000 ft view is a picture of who we want to be down the road.
This week I was reading Letters To A Skeptic by Greg Boyd. In it, he talks about a woman he knows who had been a bright, vibrant and happy person early in her life. All that changed when her sister ran off with her fiance. Or maybe I should say, all that began to change with how she reacted to that event, and how she chose to continue to react- nurturing bitterness and unforgiveness- until at the end of her life she was regarded as a difficult, bitter and angry old woman.
As I thought about that story and overlaid my own life on top of it, I realized a piece of something I had let creep in to my emotions and come out in certain actions just wasn't congruent with the person of peace I hoped to be in old age. That realization alone was enough to get me off my chair and into making a concrete change.
In other words, I realize it's not just that we make choices- it's that our choices are very literally making us. And unless those choices are guided by a picture, a blueprint of who we want to be, we'll end up becoming someone purely by accident- shaped more by our circumstances and reactions to those circumstances than by any values or vision we might have.
So here's the question: Who do you want to be? And what are you doing to become that? What are you doing that is at odds with that, that is taking you in another direction.
And more importantly, what are you going to do about it?













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