Setting course for 2011

Poatina Morning Tea devotion given today

Getting past myself this year

An important time for me, a time to reflect on the previous year. Summer’s dad, Bill Anderson was here – a remarkable counsellor – chatting about fact that if you go through a significant experience and don’t give space to make sense of it, it won’t just disappear. The further you run from a ghost, the bigger it gets. So, it is a time to reflect.

With the New Year I love getting a year planner and blocking out holidays and making sense of what the year will be. And to start to set goals for the coming year. I’ve often set goals and not achieved them. But it’s been nice over the past 4 or 5 years that at least some have come into place. Last year I had 2 goals, one to lose weight and the other to start writing. I discovered you don’t lose weight accidentally!   It was nice that the book published on Dec 29.

In terms of setting goals I came across Matt 7.  In Matt 6, Jesus finishes the Sermon on the Mount and it’s about how things are meant to be; in Matt 7, it’s saying “DO it don’t just talk about it”!  Don’t just make a show of praying, for example.

Don’t be impressed with charisma; look for character. Who preachers are, is the main thing, not what they say. A genuine leader will never exploit your emotions or your pocketbook.

And,

If you just use my words in Bible studies and don’t work them into your life, you are like a stupid carpenter who built his house on the sandy beach. When a storm rolled in and the waves came up, it collapsed like a house of cards.

If I don’t make a choice, I will just repeat stuff. Jesus is saying, there is a different way of living but you have to make choices about it.

We had a lot of discussion about Burnout last year and I did some study on it.  Yancey talked about his pastor…He felt he was suffering from Burn Out and said he felt like an old fashioned pump – his people would reach up and pull the pump, drawing on his resources, and it happened again, and again…until finally he felt he had nothing to give. He went to a Retreat and expressed these feeling to his mentor, an old nun.  Her response was, “There is only one thing you’ve  if your reservoir is dry.  You’ve got to go deeper!”

A friend sent me this quote from “Sleeping with Bread.“

“Burnout comes, not primarily from doing too much, but from doing what we don’t really want to do – so that one foot is moving forward and the other foot is trying to run away.”

And Viktor Frankl says

“What is called self actualisation is not an attainable aim at all for the simple reason the more one would strive for it, the more he would miss it.  In other words, self-actualization is possible only as a side effect of self transcendence.” The more you forget yourself by …the more you actualise yourself.

The danger of thinking about your goals is that you spend a lot of time thinking about yourself and reaching the goals actually comes from thinking beyond yourself.  As I come to the end of this patch of time, and this is first day back to “normal” for me this year,  the sense is that an important ingredient in thinking about next year is to get past myself.  Jesus says, a number of times, “Anyone he wants to follow me must lay down his life”…”what could you ever trade your soul for?”

Part of me loves that living in this village is that t calls me out to get past myself.  Our first young person has arrived in the past weekend and others are coming. That doesn’t make life easier. But I know that if I can stay in touch with the reason I’m giving myself up to Jesus, then I actually find myself. As I prepare myself I need to reflect on past year, I need to see the goal but beyond that, to Jesus.