It is said in professional sports that it is the character players who show up in the tough games to get the tough wins! I think one of the great misunderstandings about impact is to think that it is heavily weighted on our gifts and talents when it is fundamentally a character measurement. Whether it is sports, entertainment, business, there are more people with talent on the rubbish pile that discovered too late that without character talent has a short lifespan!
This week we begin our final audit of 30 Days of Prayer, ‘The Audit of our Impact’.
The impact of our life is very hard to measure or audit, because we do not have any idea where the ripples hit the shore. Yet it is good to reflect on it as maybe the most important thing about impact is not how far the ripple goes but what the ripple achieves.
Braveheart the movie has that particular scene where Mel Gibson yells that as his final words. He was trying to lead Scotland out from the Tyranny of its English masters and was now having his life extracted as the cost of that quest. Freedom is often lifted up as an ultimate value and yet there is one value that reigns above all, and that is love.
Are there things to really hate? It is such a strong term and right away we can have an aversion to it, and yet it is often the beginning of real healthy change. As with any strong word it is the context which sets it’s righteousness or unrighteousness! I hate broccoli! ...is a world apart from I hate cancer! By hating broccoli, I’m excluding something good from my life, by hating cancer I am motivated to problem solving!
To cause to feel upset, annoyed, or resentful. To be displeasing or cause problems too. That sounds like normal life to me as we interact and do life together! Offence is a normal part of doing relationship and learning how to live in love with one another. Yet our current world has turned this into a profession of being the offended!
Somebody who is normally relaxed around you all of a sudden seems distant and cool. Oblivious to what may have happened, it can leave us quite confused and frustrated. Aaaaahhhhhh what did I do? Relationships can be filled with challenges. Let me give you a tip that is found in Psalm 139 and has served me well for many decades of ministry.
Today let's make our prayer, a prayer for serenity.
God grant me the Serenity
To accept the things I cannot change,
Courage to change the things I can,
And the Wisdom to know the difference.
The balloons rose higher and higher in the sky on a crisp winters day, after being released by those who stood around the grave. The tragic loss of their young daughter, who had struggled with chronic illness, was written in the faces of the mother and father, ‘‘BAKA!” They were in the valley of Baka. That word translated literally means weeping.
The valley of ELAH is the place where the most famous story in the Bible took place. A little boy named David met the giant Goliath and ever since then it has been known as a place of courage and faith!
Most of the time when we tell the story of David we talk about what David did to Goliath. But there was something that goliath did for David that was incredibly important!
The second valley we will explore is found in Numbers 13. It is called the valley of Eshcol. This is the story of the 12 spies who were sent out to spy out the promised land that God had promised to Israel. He brought them to the border not long after leaving Egypt and placed them in the position to take what He had given them and make it their’s. When the 12 spies returned, they came with a majority report and minority report. Verse 23 says: