day 529: What Do You Love? (Redux)

Original Post: Tuesday, December 30, 2008

day 61: What Do You Love?
I sometimes amuse myself by thinking about the words we use at work that we don't really mean or words we use but would never really talk about what they mean, not at work we wouldn't that is. The greatest example of this is the word "love". We all the time will say, "I love doing...", or "I would love to take that project on", or "I'd love to get together and go over that with you", or we ask in an interview, "what do you really love to do?". But if we ever stopped to define what those loves mean or really talk about what love is and what we truly love or not, we would likely pull up short and think better about talking about this at work. Love is not a usual work topic. This is the usual time of the year when many of us take inventory of the past year and begin to set goals and objectives for the coming year. This can coincide with business planning so it seems natural to set our own professional goals and might as well set our own personal goals while we are at it. Most of us start those lists with what we want to get done throughout the year and those goals may cross the areas of physical, spiritual, relational, financial and vocation. There are always many things that we want to accomplish and achieve within the next 12 months. Not often though do we sit down and take the time to catalogue what it is that we love and how we are aligning our time, efforts, and resources against that list. Maybe this year would be a good year to think differently (thank you for that tag line Apple). If we were to start with what it is that we truly love and then build our personal and professional goals from there, then the list might be different this year and it might even be eye-opening or life-changing. We are told in I John 2:15 that we are to "stop loving the evil world and all that it offers you, for when you love the world, you show you do not have the love of the Father in you". What does this mean for us as believers who are trying to bring purpose to our work and lives? What this means is that we are to take a hard look at ourselves and determine what it is that we are truly putting our love towards and if it is towards worldly ways that undermine who it is that we can ultimately be for Christ, that we need to re-prioritize and do so quickly. This is relevant in our work and the examples we are in the workplace. If we are chasing that next promotion and raise and doing so at all costs to ourselves, our families and our co-workers, it is a pretty good bet that money and power would be high up, if not on the top of, our "I love..." list. These are hard things to reconcile but God calls us to be constantly checking ourselves and making adjustments. To be the person He wants us to be at work would not to be known as the person who is blindly chasing money, power, or even the next job. The right life example would be one where others could see that there is a larger context and purpose that we chase and fix our eyes upon and how we work is influenced by that choice. As we look to a new year, now would be the best of times to take a love inventory before we set our next year's goals and objectives.

Reference: I John 2:15 (New Living Testament)

day 556: Contentment

This time of the year when we start thinking about our results and progress for the year and more importantly, we start to think about next year's goals, we can start to get tough on ourselves and even more so start to look left and right and wonder why we haven't accomplished enough or more. Especially in the workplace there is the push to beat last year's performance with more, better, faster, and bigger. It is always good to have goals to strive to achieve and good to have goals that cause us to grow and stretch to new levels. Just by doing the assessment and writing our goals down, we become one of the 5% who actually do so. It's a small percentage of people who use goal setting and goal tracking to set their course. So, it is all good when we set those goals and start to measure. Where it becomes tricky is in the comparison of others and their performance, results and rewards. We must remember that the race we run is with ourselves. It is easy to start to look left and right and begin to see how we stack up and then either let that drag us down or sometimes worse, cause us to overcompensate and overreach to try and best someone else. I find that those who start from a place of being content in their own skin, knowing their limitations but still striving to expand and grow into those boundaries are not only the happiest people but also the people who just seem to have it more together than the people who are out there trying to prove to others how they are better. A good rule of thumb is to establish a level of contentment to work from and then push off from that place. Contentment is not always bad if put in the context of still moving and growing. I am not content with my Marathon running times, but I am content with knowing that I am in better shape than most and will never win a race or even place anywhere near recognition or reward. Paul told Timothy to establish his launching off position to be at the most simple level, "So if we have enough food and clothing, let us be content." From that place and perspective, Timothy grew and became more but he didn't forget that there was a set of basics to be content. As we set our goals for 2011 let us find our place of humility and contentment and then strive to grow from that place.

Reference: 1 Timothy 6:8 (New Living Testament)

day 499: Goals That Carry Us Forward

Goal setting is just part of work. If we don't have goals and objectives that we strive to achieve then we will end up standing still and the rest of the world will pass us by. We have to have goals to know where we are going and to also mark milestones of what we have accomplished. Goals can be those big hairy audacious ones that they talk about in the book "Built to Last", or they can be small goals that give us sense of forward movement and accumulated with other goals end up completing something big and important. Regardless, we have to have goals. Goals also can carry us through the hard or confusing times when we are not getting clear direction from our boss. We can use them as clarifying tools to go back to those we work for and say, "I am doing this, is this right or wrong for me to try and accomplish?". Too many times we wait for others to set our goals for us. We should instead be always reevaluating and setting new goals for ourselves so that we are always strengthening and getting better. I was just reading the book of Job. Each time I read this book in the Old Testament I pray a prayer of thanks for not every having been tested like Job. Early in Job's account he says in Chapter 6, verse 11: "But I do not have the strength to endure. I do not have a goal that encourages me to carry on." Job describes goals as not only a positive but also as a way to work around the negatives in our life. When faced with adversity, trouble or perceived calamity, we can set goals that help carry us forward. What goals have you set for your yourself for the rest of this year, this coming month, this week or today? Without goals we will not move forward. Let us find the goals that we know will carry us forward to work for God's glory.

Reference: Job 6:11 (New Living Testament)