Tag: needverse

107 – Planning Makes Satisfaction

Of all the skills and subjects of school to learn, the most important lesson is the ability to control one’s time and schedule. My friend once blurted in the car, “My family doesn’t plan anything, but it’s not because we don’t know how, but because we don’t want to be committed if something better comes along.” His parents are divorced, so is he. It’s a problem for him and he says so more than I.

Good things come along from time to time. You can only catch them if you are ready. But, the best things in life can only be planned because they require preparation. Your children will live the type of life you do. If your family lives a free-spirited life, they will always be happy, but they will never be satisfied. They will hunger for something better, but they will always be chasing the next wave—always chasing the wind, yet never learning to soar—because the very best things in life can only be planned.

Parallel to planning is spontaneity. About half of God’s gifts come along without warning and if you reject everything that you don’t plan for, you will miss God’s best. Planning is not about locking down the future in your scheduling calendar, but about preparation. Preparation includes the unforeseen.

The secret to living effectively with planned spontaneity is think like a homing missile or a game of golf. First, know your general direction and stay on the fairway. If it’s a par 5, the second step is to get to the green. Third is the hole. But, you’ll never be able to “birdie” a hole unless you get years of regular practice. That means saying no to last minute movies and getting out of bed—or boogying after work—to the driving range.

Even the best golf courses offer rain checks, but no strong, healthy, toned body happens without exercise and diet being the priority. If the practice doesn’t get done, neither do the results; it doesn’t matter the excuse. “Flex days” smartly prepare spontaneity—the exception, not the rule. You must rule your time, otherwise others will rule you because they ruled their own time first.

106 – Never Threaten

The very act of making any kind of threat means the threat-maker has become unhinged. Listen, understand, make your case, then accept and confirm their response. Let your actions in the days and years to follow be your rebuttal. Develop a reputation for meaning what you say the first time. Make sure people know, by your actions, that you respond without second warning—your initial conversation was the first and only warning.

If you catch a murder on tape, don’t walk up to the killer and threaten to go to the authorities if he doesn’t turn himself in. He already knows he did what is wrong. Lay low, keep quiet, survive, and report the crime as soon as you can. If a police officer is wrong in his work on the street and you can prove it, never tell him. Suggest that he do what is right once at most. After that, be diplomatic, be respectful, say, “Yes sir,” as often as you can, then go home and make sure he never works in law enforcement again.

This does not work the same relationships. A police officer has authority and force, which he can use. Never interfere with a police officer’s work on the scene, the same goes for any authority or criminal. Catching criminals safely and surely requires due process. If a revolution is in order, that must involve action on a larger, legal, respectful scale. Don’t just be a bumbling rebel. Like “tank man” who stopped the parade of tanks in China, wave around your grocery bag, then be on your way, he didn’t demand that anyone abdicate.

The Bible is clear about conflict in relationships: first one-on-one, then four at most, then the assembled authority. In a command structure, there are supervisors who must carefully review and verify at every step along the way. But, in that first one-on-one confrontation, don’t threaten to use that system; just use it. Kindly explain the right thing, the right reasons, and the right action. If the person doesn’t listen, go home and move to step two. When you must escalate, neither threaten nor warn. After all, a warning is a threat to the person being warned.

104 – God of Higher Ways and Higher Thoughts

God is more than the Creator of all things; He is the inventor. He imagined everything even before He created it. He is infinitely imaginative.

God’s ideas and methods are even more incomprehensible than the incomprehensible nature that He created us in.

Some things God will not explain to us simply because it’s not possible for us to understand. Other things we would easily understand, but God chooses not to tell us for good reason—and it is those reasons that we are incapable of understanding.

A father on the south side of Chicago told his eight year old son to get out of the street. The son defiantly asked him why. “I’m a forty year old man,” the dad answered. “If you can understand my thinking, what does that say about me?”

While we make our plans, God looks down from His higher viewpoint and sees many more things than we see. Our logistics and limitations are much smaller than the immensely bigger picture that God sees. While we may think we have everything worked out—for how we plan to do a thing or how a thing will happen—God already has a better idea.

Hopefully, with an ongoing prayer life in God, our plans will not attempt to outsmart or conflict with God. We certainly don’t need to consider something He might have overlooked. As we mature in God, our plans should try to align themselves with God’s plans. Most importantly in this, our plans must account for the fact that our plans will always remain incomplete by definition.

“Godly” planning will have enormous gaps that read “this is where God has to do something because I’m clueless”, but then we execute the parts of the plan that fall into our responsibility. The insight to know which parts are which comes with a lot of time, a lot of Bible study, a lot of prayer, and a lot of very exciting journeys with God.

The Bible itself being God’s Word will be above our own understanding and will teach higher ways and methods. Studying the Bible will help us to get less unaccustomed to the God Whose ways are higher than ours.

103 – End Times Evangelism

By the dawn of the twentieth century, the Gospel of Jesus had made its way into every formal nation on Earth, with a smattering of “sub-nations” that have not heard about Jesus. Jesus commanded his disciples to preach the Gospel to every nation and said that the End would be near once every nation had heard; this means that we are in “End Times” by “Biblical” definition from that specific teaching of Jesus. This “Gospel” is the message that the one and only Son of God had died on a Roman Cross to atone for all humanity’s sins, otherwise punishable in the afterlife and thus a curse in this lifetime. “Nations” is Greek for “peoples” or “ethnic groups”; “evangelism” is the Greek verb for “telling Gospel”.

In the New Testament, “missions” focused on introducing the message of Jesus to people for the first time, then maintaining correspondence, distance discipleship, and cooperation. This correspondence comprises much of the New Testament—letters written to the very first Christians, organized collectively by city.

“Missions” today is much different since most of the “introduction” phase has already been completed. This has many ramifications, among them is the need to teach Christians about deeper things of God beyond the basic news that Jesus atoned our sin. Miracles, healing, and prophetic experiences show us more about God’s love; they are part of understanding God’s Word in its fullness. The New Testament teaches us to progress and grow in God this way.

Another ramification is that most people we encounter in our day-to-day lives have already heard about Jesus—they need “clarification” about who Jesus is. One of the best ways is through miracles; miracles are difficult to debate.

But, from the beginning, “evangelism” was never a quest to persuade people, but a quest to find them. Once shown the real Jesus, people only reject him because they want to. Evangelism about Jesus isn’t a sales pitch; it’s a message to which people respond and inasmuch identify themselves as already having their names written in the Lamb’s Book of Life. If spreading the message of Jesus is about “finding” rather than “selling”, it should be easier to do and easier to accept.

102 – Train your Snap Habits

Train your snap reactions—not swearing, kindly rebuking, strategic reaction, driving, family decisions, et cetera. Too much occurs in life to anticipate every circumstance or calculate how to respond. In essence, this means living by principles. More specifically, it means ingraining your principles into your habits so that acting on your principles becomes second nature.

Consider news, politics, and business. By automatically presuming, “If everyone is doing it, I won’t,” you will keep your business unique—and thus “necessary”—, you won’t be shocked by what happens in the news, and you will know the political climate enough to adapt in advance. Just the same, the principle from Jesus, “Build your house on the rock,” will tell you which governments, economies, and companies will collapse and which will last. Then, when the billionaires and newspapers try to tell you where they hope you should invest in, you’ll be smart enough to know, “They lie to their people. It won’t last.” Then, when stock sinks like ENRON and GM, and everyone is in panic, you’ll say, “They didn’t pay taxes, so they weren’t profiting, I don’t care what the accountants say about GAAP.”

But, these must be habits.

As you approach 40 years old, many practices in your life will become habits. Then, you’ll mostly live on autopilot, all the while thinking, “I’m tired.” So, wisely choose your habits before that time arrives, lest your habits choose themselves.

It is vital to train these habits early on and include among them innovation and “flexibility” as key habits. You do not want your habits to be dependent on geopolitical paradigms nor technology, which always change. The best way to remain flexible with the times, as a habit, is to learn outdated technology and artisan craftsmanship. Learning to type, for example, write cursive or calligraphy, playing older video games, occasionally dressing old school, using transportation means from 100 years ago, studying steam engines and traditional sand casting—these will help you see technology in a transcendent way. If you do that, then technology will be for you a river, not a pillar, meaning you will flow in technological changes, even in your old age, merely as a habit.

101 – Know Your Own Minimum Work

If a requirement can’t be met, there is no need to discuss the matter further. If the facts are wrong or unknown, nothing can be done until the truth be known. If it’s not your responsibility, don’t think another moment of it.

Focus on the difference you can make, for better or worse. Always prepare for the unexpected, give forethought to future situations, but don’t fantasize about things beyond your stewardship. Be considerate of others and be concerned about your own responsibility, not vice versa.

The world has no shortage of nosy people minding other people’s businesses. Nor is there any lack of dreamy managers designing artwork to paint the outside walls of a building while its foundations crumble. Everything has a minimum and everyone has his own business; keep your laser focus there.

Multiple projects and forked approaches aren’t bad. Single-product, single-service business models may work for some people while other people’s “single” mission is to have many smaller, related missions. Don’t confuse diversity with distraction. You can pursue many venues as long as you know the minimum needed to keep the ship afloat and don’t neglect it.

At the negotiating table, too much energy is wasted on posturing, “I don’t need you, but I want you,” chatter. East Asians love to gang up on the Western business prospect in their meetings. Don’t get lost. Steer your way through any kind of sales pitch, business proposal, suggestion to change your methods and mission—keep your direction my knowing you minimum and asking for neither more nor less.

If you can change your mind after an hour of niggling, you owe a consulting fee for help with “visioning”. Think through in advance. The, treat the meeting as a fact-finding mission; listen, understand, ask questions, learn.

It’s hard to stay focused on delivering a package you don’t recognize. But, when you know your minimum mission, you’ll have the guiding light to travel lightweight. What you need and don’t need along your journey won’t require a committee. Decisions can be made at the drop of a hat because, frankly, you’ve already made those decisions. You know your minimums, everything else is a matter of walking it out.

100 – God the All Wise

Any of our own wisdom found its origin in God. All wisdom flows from Him—whether the wisdom we gain by seeking or the wisdom we gain with age and hard knocks.

God’s wisdom is not merely a kind of “cheating” based on His knowledge of everything. If God were to take a test He would pass by mere virtue of knowing the answer key. Having all academic knowledge would not necessarily mean that God would pass the test because most of our tests expect the wrong answers because our incomplete knowledge of science is flawed in light of His perfection. But, none of God’s vast knowledge relates to His separate nature of being infinitely and eternally wise.

Even without being the epitome of a living encyclopedia, God would know how to handle any and every situation. God could defeat the devil even without being all powerful or all knowing because He still possesses the wisdom of how to handle situations correctly.

God’s pure wisdom was demonstrated in Jesus’s early life. Jesus grew in wisdom and stature. He had to learn to speak and walk, yet through his life he pursued and gained an enormous collection of “nuggets of wisdom” because he was born merely with the infinite, God-sized love for wisdom itself. In this sense, Jesus was the wisest “old soul” there ever was or will be.

Jesus was born with the eternal and perfect essence of wisdom, but the actual “nuggets” of wise thinking he thus gained as he grew up. God demonstrates His wisdom perfectly through His Son, Christ Jesus of Nazareth.

In Jesus’s adulthood, he knew how to answer the Pharisees and scribes because his perfect pursuit of wisdom from childhood had given him the understanding so that he knew what to say, even when he did not have the greater position of authority over the leaders who confronted him.

Jesus shared this wisdom in his teaching, advising us on relationships and confrontation with authority. Likewise, God teaches us wisdom throughout the Bible. Solomon asked God for wisdom and God granted it to him. You too can receive wisdom. All you need to do is ask from the infinitely wise God.