Last night I was listening to Priscilla Shirer at the end of her lesson in the book titled One In a Million when she used a well-known cliché with a new application. At least for me. “If you’ve done things the way you’ve always done them, you’ll get the same things you’ve always gotten.” Remember I’ve confessed more than once that I can be a little slow on the uptake. How many times have I heard that same phrase used in business presentations, business books, business meetings, in consultations … many. How many times have I heard it applied to the life of an individual, the life of me? Probably just as many times, but by the time I ran it through all my filters, it’s impact evaporated. Note to self … to make a change, I actually have to change something. I don’t know about you, but sometimes little changes are the most difficult to make. Could it because the little things are such a part of us, they are as common and ingrained as the position we take while we sleep? Have you ever had to change your sleep position? Yah. It’s tough. You know why? Well duh! I’m sleeping. I don’t know what I’m doing when I’m sleeping.
To make a change, requires that I actually ‘make a change’, a conscious change. I have a couple habits that I do as naturally as breathing. They aren’t necessarily bad, but they are unproductive and I need to change. My goal is to write online courses. I’d like to start today, but since this is not a goal that leans toward overnight success, what can I change to get me to that goal? I envision moving one paw out of the familiar track and pulling the rest of myself onto a new pattern. If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you might remember my love of the tapestry analogy. All the strings of life are woven together in this magnificent masterpiece. We don’t even realize the intricate beauty of the pattern because we are so engrossed in living the pattern. When God looks down from heaven, he sees the pattern because he created it. We are under it and sometimes all we see is the mess of tangled threads, but even then sometimes the pattern is evident.
The tapestry is the result of what I weave into each day. If I don’t like the way the pattern is turning out, I have to change the color of the thread, or the placement of the color. In my quiet time I was reading 1 Corinthians 10 and wondered how the message translation would describe the event going on there. 1 Corinthians 10:11-12 describes my thoughts quite well “These are all warning markers—danger!—in our history books, written down so that we don’t repeat their mistakes. Our positions in the story are parallel—they at the beginning, we at the end—and we are just as capable of messing it up as they were. Don’t be so naive and self-confident. You’re not exempt. You could fall flat on your face as easily as anyone else. Forget about self-confidence; it’s useless. Cultivate God-confidence.”
How about you? Do you have something you really want to change? It starts with a thought and a thought reaps an action, which reaps a habit. That’s another old cliché that I’ve heard but have not put into practice. To make a change, requires change. I’ll meet you out there.
Because of Grace we Press On