Scary success



Sharing for this week - on Sunday, my pastor was telling us that in order not to fall down when skiing, you have to remain at right angles to your skis. When skiing downhill, this means the skiier has to lean forward into the fall, which is counter-intuitive. In other words, you have to throw yourself INTO the slope and commit to falling! Leaning back or attempting to hold back is actually counter-productive, since that actually causes you to really fall down!

I don't know anything about skiing so I can't verify the above! But I did play basketball in JC and Uni. And one of the similarly counter-intuitive things I learned was that when you commit to attack the basket and don't worry about getting blocked, you actually have a much smaller chance of getting blocked. Believing that you will get to the basket and fully committing your body to getting there actually helps you to achieve it physically. Strange but true.

In the same way, I would like to encourage us to commit 100% to the task of being God's witnesses in our homes and in our workplaces, because going in 50%, 60% or even 90% absolutely guarantees failure. As Jesus said: "No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for service in the kingdom of God." Luke 9:62.

I realise as I write this that this is something we probably all know already. The question is, are we doing anything about what we know, or are we content to fail? Phew, tough question. Sometimes it's less scary to plan to fail, isn't it? Sort of like doing an opportunity analysis and hoping it's negative. Then we don't have to follow through. It's a big challenge, but let's be DETERMINED to SUCCEED, and succeed SCARILY! After all,

The LORD is my light and my salvation—
WHOM SHALL I FEAR?
The LORD is the stronghold of my life—
OF WHOM SHALL I BE AFRAID?

Psalm 27:1

Cheers and a happy Chinese New Year to all.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Life as a pie chart

Image
Someone told me recently about a "life exercise" in which one compiles all the stuff that makes up your life, and puts it in a pie chart.  So let's say for me, something like this. The idea is to visually demonstrate to myself that, in the event I lose one of these things, then I can see that, hey life is not so bad, that wasn't such a big deal.  Say for example, if I suffered a blown ACL, and couldn't run or play basketball any more, like this: At first blush - I'd say, hey, I still have my wife, children, parents, career, church life - so, chin up, things are not so bad.  Pretty good life visualisation tool to bring some optimism back into play! ... But what if, a month later, something happens at work, and boom, career gets sidetracked, I lose my job, or get put in cold storage somewhere, like this: Oops, now only half my life is left!  With only half of life's meaning left to me, what do I do? And what if something happens to
Read more

Bullying? Stand up!

Image
When I was a kid, I remember being bullied a fair bit.  I was small for my age, bespectacled, shy.    The teachers didn't help by putting a target on my back by making me Vice Head Prefect.  I would get my stuff just taken away from me by bigger kids, dragged out into the field to be tickled until I collapsed (much less fun than it sounds), and pushed into the storm drains.  Not all the kids were full-blown bullies of course.  But I remember some of them standing by, and politely holding my spectacles (so they wouldn't be broken) while the bullies did their work on me. Most of this stopped when I got to secondary school, where a much larger proportion of my fellow students were now just as nerdy!  And of course I grew up too.  I don't really look back on those days with any kind of animosity, because I think it never occurred to me that it was unusual.  But I do think my experience made me a bit more sympathetic about people around me who are being bullied. When you
Read more

Family AND Team

Image
I heard an interesting viewpoint this weekend. A family is not inherently a team. Hmm.  Sometimes at work, often in church, and most of the time at home, you hear people say to each other that we are family. And often, we really are. We care for each other above and beyond transactional matters.  It matters to me when my colleagues and cell group members (and of course my actual family members) go through illnesses or family issues or work challenges. I root for their success at presentations and projects and relationships. I care about what they care about, even if it has little direct impact on my own life. In a way, a family is sort of an amalgam of people who support each other in pursuit of each member's personal goals. For example, as a father, I support my children in their academic, career and ministry goals. But where they go to school, the grades they get, and the careers and ministries they build - they're really their goals, not mine.  Ditto for my role as a church
Read more