From Tony: Today’s guest post is from my friend Juan Cruz. If you’re interested in guest posting, click here.
Do you want to live an exceptional life?
Exceptional living can take various forms. It might be writing the book, you’ve always dreamed of. Digging wells in Africa. Traversing the Appalachian trial. Feeding the hungry in an impoversihed nation. Or maybe even white water rafting in the Grand Canyon.
What do you need to live exceptionally? Motivation of course…well sort of.
From Tony: This is a guest post by Jon Stople. If you are interested in submitting a guest post, click here.
When I was a kid, I had big dreams. I dreamed of being a Broadway actor. I dreamed of opening my own baseball card store. I dreamed of flying in outer space. I dreamed of creating a new town where pollution was low, where people got along, and where people were proud to live and work.
What happened to these dreams?
Maybe some of these dreams were unrealistic. Maybe some of my interests changed as life moved forward. Maybe. But maybe somewhere along the way I stopped dreaming.
It’s easy to allow the realities, pressures, and challenges of daily living to dampen our dream mechanism. We grow complacent with the status quo. We become content with puny passions.
What happened to dreaming big?
How can we reawaken our capacity and desire to dream big?
I love telling stories. When I read books, I read them out loud just to practice. Storytelling is an art and with an unskilled storyteller, a great story can turn into a boring one.
Ironically, telling a good story isn’t the same as living a good story. Even great storytellers can live boring lives.
In the past I’ve had a difficult time coming up with stories about my own life. I have no problem taking someone else’s story and telling it well. But the story I lived didn’t always seem all that interesting.
There are a couple of reasons why I wasn’t living a better story.
I work at a church that is located approximately 3 miles away from Chik-Fil-A. Naturally we make it there on a regular basis. Anything else would be blasphemy, no?
We love going there not just because the food is great (I could seriously eat my body weight in chicken nuggets) but the service is stellar.
As soon as we walk in we are greeted by name. We receive a big smile from Frank, the hospitality manager (that’s his title, no kidding) and a high-five from Shiloh who ensures our beverages are always refilled. It’s like coming home for lunch, except I don’t have to eat a microwaved meal whilst being subjected to daytime television.
In my last trip, I got to meet Seth, the owner. He rang up my order and asked me what my name was. He didn’t ask it for my order, he seemed genuinely interested in finding out my name. I felt like a celebrity. I had to refrain from autographing my receipt and giving it back to him.
I haven’t written much about marriage in the last 6 months. Honestly, I’m not always sure what’s appropriate to share or how soon after something happens. So I err on the side of caution.
But there are great things happening in my marriage. I’m learning a lot about what it means to be a man. I’m learning that even when you think you have issues from your past dealt with, they still have a tendency to creep in subtly if you aren’t on guard.
Last year I wrote a guest post called The Weight of Expectation. It talked about how when we put the weight of expectation on our relationships, they end up in disappointment. It was actually eerily similar to my post this week. The post from last year talks about shifting from expectation to expectancy and I used that same verse in Romans 5, that I used this week.
As I reflect on what I wrote, I realize that it doesn’t matter how much information you have in your head about a subject. What matters is that you walk it out with someone. And for this lesson to “take,” I’ve had to walk it out in my marriage.
A friend of mine is pregnant. I mean really pregnant. Like, feet swollen to twice their normal size and assigned to bed rest by her doctor, pregnant. Every time we speak she says the same thing. I just want this baby to come already!
I can’t possibly understand what she’s going through. I am confident that if you needed further proof to believe that women can sustain pain long term better than men, just look at pregnancy. I would have tapped out in the first trimester. I HATE throwing up!
I’m praying that this process is over for her soon. And yet at the same time, I know that it can’t be over too soon. The baby has to come to full term before she’s ready to enter into this world. If she were born as soon as the pain began, she wouldn’t have survived.
From Tony: Darrell has become a personal friend since moving down to plant a church here in south Florida. I’m excited to share this post from him today. If you’re interested in guest posting, you can find out more here.
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In the past four months of my life I got married, moved across the country, and joined a team of people planting a church in West Palm Beach, FL. Sometimes all the commotion and chaos leaves me wondering:
Wow, life is hard as it is. Why on earth am I doing this all at once?
Why would I step into a season where fear, frustration and failure are just plain inevitable? Isn’t life hard enough? Why would I choose to live through a season that I could have predicted — just with basic life wisdom — would be so uncomfortable?
The first answer is that God told me to, and I’m being obedient.
When I worked in corporate America, I learned that there was one key element to fitting in. You had to develop your ability to complain in the break room.
Commiseration was a key point of solidarity. Over warmed up Hot Pockets, I discovered that the degree to which you hated your job was equivalent to the number of years in the same department.
In my 5 years on the job, I did find some solace in commiseration. At first it was a way to realize that I wasn’t alone. I needed to know that I wasn’t the only one frustrated with how the company did business in certain areas. But then it just became a way to blow off steam.
After an especially heated conversation with a customer or employee in another department, complaining was a cathartic exercise. It was a temporary release of frustration to completely berate the object of my vexation without actually having to confront the issue.
Five years later when I had another job opportunity, I handed in my letter of resignation faster than the drip coffee could percolate.
I long for validation. I’m not talking about kind words from an acquaintance. I’m talking about weighty validation from someone I respect. But many times I sabotage a compliment before it can even come.
Have you ever created something that you loved and then felt like you hated it?
I’ve actually apologized for my creativity. I’ve done it before anyone could make a comment just so that I can protect my heart from criticism.
If you’re like me, you have probably already OD’d on hearing about New Year’s Resolutions or the One Word of the year. I’m pretty sure I read my body weight in blog posts about these subjects. It’s all good and very ambitious. But what would it look like to have an anti-resolution for the year?
A good friend of mine named Carla just started blogging. She inspired me to something I’ve never had the courage to face with the right perspective:
Failure