Archive - June, 2010
What’s Your Financial Plan?
You have probably heard the phrase that says “if you fail to plan, you plan to fail”. That’s probably true in all of life but is especially true in the realm of finances. Everybody needs some type of financial plan for how they will manage their money otherwise we end up like most Americans, saving -2% each year while swimming in debt. Dave Ramsey is a great Christian financial guru who’s company helps people become debt free using a specific plan.
One of the blogs I follow is Patrick Mitchell’s. Patrick is a children’s minister at a church in Charlotte, NC, and recently he blogged his experience implementing Dave Ramsey’s plan a few years ago. I thought it might be helpful to read and learn from his experience:
Our journey with the plan (part 1)
Can I Have That Without All The Work? – Part 2
In the previous post I talked about how we all want things and often times there are specific people who have what we want. Obviously we need to guard against envy and selfishness but there is also something else we sometimes miss when thinking about what we want in life. If you’re like me, you want it NOW. Or, if we’re practicing patience….next week. We see somebody else who has what we want and we wonder why that can’t be us?
What I often miss is the fact that the person that has what I want, usually put in a ton of time and effort to get it. For instance, the pastor of a hugely influential church may have worked 10 years to get there, sacrificing countless things in the process. He may have saved money for years to prepare for not being paid for the first 3 years of the church’s existence. He may have lost friends in the process of growing the church, because they no longer believed in his vision. He may have gone through tough spiritual battles that typically come with leading a church. God may have done some hard work on him to prepare him for that journey. But, from my perspective, I typically forget about all that and wonder why that can’t be me…..now.
More common is the fact that we usually don’t even know all that information anyway. Most successful people haven’t documented all the things they went through to get where they are. We just assume it happened over night. In the business world Jim Collins calls this the flywheel concept. People inside the loop feel like it takes forever to get great momentum and success and people outside the loop feel like it happened overnight.
I want to never discount the journey and the hard work others put in to get where they are. In terms of a relationship with Jesus, the journey is where we are molded, developed and prepared.
The inspiration for these posts came from watching the video interview with Matt Chandler below. He talks about going from being a janitor to becoming a pastor and the importance of all of that. I’ll never forget my first time teaching middle school kids the Bible, and how beneficial the time I spent in that role was.
Can I Have That Without All The Work? – Part 1
Regardless of what field you work in or what skills you have, you can probably identify some people you look up to. Maybe it’s a celebrity, an athlete, or one of the best in your field but we all know what it’s like to want something somebody else has. Often times we want it for great reasons, too. In church world plenty of people want a big church so they can be a strong influence in their city. Church planters (people who start new churches) want their church to explode with growth like Elevation experienced. Yeah, that’s probably 1 out of 10,000 churches, but why can’t they have that?
You may want the house, job, vehicle, vacation experience, influence, book deal, music album, acting job or wisdom somebody else has. I can tell you I will always want to be a part of a hugely influential church. I also have to acknowledge my pride and selfishness in that, even though my motives are mostly pure (I hope). I want to see cities in America, and particularly my city of Baltimore, transformed by Jesus Christ. The Church (universal, not just one church) is God’s Plan A for making that happen, so naturally I want to be a part of a great church that is making a big difference.
At various times I want a host of other things as well, mostly things that are selfish and material in nature. In the next post I’ll talk about something I miss or forget about in the midst of all that. It’s not going to be about envy or the fact that we have all received one blessing after another through Jesus. That’s all true and important but I’m going to talk about the work that it takes to to get what we want.
In the mean time…. WHAT DO YOU WANT, SELFISHLY OR NOT?
