Recently I just celebrated my birthday, and I’ve always
hated the fact that my birthday comes in January. Because my birthday comes right after the
holidays, people are broke, tired and at least 10 pounds overweight. Everyone has already started their New Year’s
resolutions , so no one is able to spend money, eat and they are by now, all
partied out. Many times, I’ve vowed to
change the date that I celebrate my birthday; I have always wanted to celebrate
my birthday in some warm weather. I’ve
always envied people who are born in the warm summer months, they have it made,
everybody is in the mood to party and have fun in the summer. Next year maybe I will just go celebrate my
birthday by throwing a party for all of my friends and family in Miami or
better yet Hawaii….
Anyway, it turns out that this year, as in years past; my
birthday was one of the coldest days of the year yet, here in Atlanta. And since I hate, hate, hate cold weather, I
celebrated my birthday indoors. This was
good for me, because I’ve decided to use this time to do a little reflecting
and reconciling. This is something I do
every year at this time; it seems to be the one advantage of being born in
January. Every year for the past several
years, on my birthday, I look back over my life and evaluate my progress in
accomplishing my goals, my relationships, my areas of weakness, and my
mistakes(so that I can learn from them-NO REGRETS THOUGH). I do this to make sure that I’m headed in the
right direction, and that I’m not
wasting time and energy on people and projects that are not in line with my
purpose and with my ideology. I don’t just do this in January, I do it as
often as possible, but it’s especially important to me on my birthday. I need
just to make certain that I don’t roll all of my old mistakes over into the New
Year.
For example, in the
past, I’ve wasted valuable time by allowing the wrong people into my inner
sanctum, and more often than not, I wound up getting off the track of my
intended purpose. This process usually
occurred in a very insidious facet. Most
of the time, it was so gradual that I didn’t even realize that it was
happening. When you let someone into
your life (at least for me) and you care about them, naturally you want to make
them happy. But if you don’t have goals and purposes that coincide with one another,
and that’s where the problems begin. If
we aren’t careful we can mistake supporting someone else’s goals for adopting
their goals, and what started off as supporting a friend, can turn into extreme compromise of your own
values, principals or ideas, and eventually abandonment of self.
There were many times when I tried so hard to please people
who were impossible to please, and didn’t appreciate my efforts. As a result I wasn’t true to myself, and I
wound up unhappy anyway. One of my
favorite performers; Chante’ Moore said it best, “Why do we give ourselves
away, until only emptiness remains?”
And let’s not forget those people whom are constantly causing
drama, chaos and turmoil in their own lives and simply by means of association,
their havoc starts to spill over into your life as well, causing you to expend
valuable energy that you could have been using elsewhere in your life. At
least that’s how it has happened to me.
When I decide to let a person into my life, I give it my all to make
that relationship work. The way I see
it, this can be both a blessing and a curse.
But this is why I must constantly evaluate my relationships, to make
sure that I don’t allow them to pull me off of my destined path and onto
theirs.
Another area of my life I need to watch closely is taking on
too many projects or activities that just keep me busy, but don’t put me any
closer to attaining my goals. Taking on
unproductive busy work has proven to prematurely exhaust my most valuable
resources, which are my time and my energy.
I call these my most valuable resources because these are the only two
that I cannot retrieve. Unlike money,
which, ebbs and flows, comes and goes, like the currents in the water, money is
supposed to move, it’s a conduit, its very nature is to come and then go. There’s
no doubt that money is an expression of energy.
But time, as they say, waits for no man and like time, energy, once it’s
wasted, it can never be regained.
In the past I’ve wasted lots of both, by getting involved in
the wrong projects, opportunities, ventures and get rich quick schemes. Until I discovered my purpose, I would just
throw paint against the wall hoping that something would eventually stick.
But today as I sat and reminisced on this past year, I
realized that I had overlooked a very significant pattern that I had developed
in my life. This pattern involved a
certain stubbornness that I had around changing some of my daily habits and my
procrastination in severing stagnate relationships. What’s so amazing is that I didn’t recognize
those tendencies until today.
Occasionally, when God wants to lead me in a particular
direction, He will often do it through something someone may say to me. This time He led me to listen to a sermon by
my spiritual father; T.D. Jakes (although he doesn’t know he’s my spiritual
father, in my mind, I’ve adopted him and given him that title…lol) he pointed
it out to me. His sermon was entitled, “There’s
nothing as powerful as a changed mind.” And
it really spoke to my spirit; it’s definitely worth checking out.
In this sermon, Bishop Jakes talked
about “Changing your default Settings”.
And after listening to his thought provoking lecture, I was then led me
to read chapters 12 and 13 from Genesis. These were the first two chapters
where God first called Abraham and told him that someday he would be the father
of many nations.
When God first called Abraham, He told him that he was to
first, pack up all that he owned and leave his home and relatives and go to
this unknown place that He would reveal to him later. Now obviously, that would not be an easy
thing for any of us to do, including Abraham, even though he is called the
father of our faith, because Abraham only partially obeyed God. Yes he did pack up and leave as God had
instructed him, but he took his nephew, Lot with him, when God clearly told him
to leave his relatives behind. Over the
next two chapters of Genesis, Abraham had physically moved his entire
household, his servants, his belongings and livestock, no less than six
times. And Abraham wasn’t done making
mistakes yet, while fleeing a famine he lied to the king of Egypt and basically
sold his wife as a concubine to the king out of fear for his own life. But what I noticed was that even though
Abraham continued to make all of these mistakes, was disobedient and didn’t
always exercise the best judgment, God continued to protect him, provide for
him and increase him financially. In fact,
God blessed Abraham as well as Lot, simply as a result of his association with
Abraham. God had blessed the two of them
so much that they had both become very wealthy with livestock and servants. The
ironic thing was that their wealth is what eventually almost tore their relationship
apart; it did separate them physically.
The land that they were sharing could not continue to support the
multitude of all that they had both accumulated, while they were living so
close together. Abraham gave Lot the best part of the land,
and Lot took it and went on his way.
I’m sure this too was hard for Abraham, because although God
did promise him that someday he would have children, he didn’t yet have any of
his own, and Lot was like a son to him.
But it wasn’t until Lot had left Abraham that God allowed him to stop
the seemingly aimless wandering that he was doing. It was then that God allowed Abraham to
settle down, so that he could develop the intimate relationship between the two
of them that He had intended from the beginning. Abraham was now free to focus the attention
and energy that he was putting into his relationship with Lot into his
relationship with God. God needed this
one on one time with Abraham to prepare him for the blessing that He had
promised him. God needed to retrain
Abraham’s thoughts, and the behavior patterns that he had carried with him that
he inherited from his family. It was
very hard for Abraham to break his old habits and patterns while he was still
hanging out with his family members that were still practicing those same old
behavior patterns. Basically, he needed
to strip Abraham of his old ways, build new habits and remold him all over
again.
This process went on between God and Abraham for several
more years. For a while, Abraham continued to repeat his old habits and fall
into some of the weaknesses of his past by rescuing Lot from Sodom and
Gomorrah, and conceiving Ismael with his servant girl outside of his
marriage. Until one day, at 99 years
old, it seemed as though Abraham just woke up, and one day and decided to do
things differently. After many years of moving around in circles and repeating
the same mistakes, time after time, he learned how to “Change His Default
Settings”, and he finally got it right. And
the good news is that just one Year after Abraham implemented the changes
necessary in his life, the promise that God had made to him so many years ago,
was manifested and he and his wife Sarah birthed Isaac.
It was after reading Abraham’s story, that I also understood
that changing one’s default settings is a process, it doesn’t happen overnight.
While studying Abraham’s saga, a light
bulb suddenly came on in my head that connected his narrative with my own life
journey. Through the clarity of my “Ah
ha moment,” I could clearly see Abraham’s mistakes and the patterns that caused
him to continue to repeat those mistakes.
I could also see why God’s intention from the beginning was for Abraham to
leave his family of origin and their patterns behind him, before to setting off
on the journey God needed him to take to become the man he needed to be, before
making him the “Father of many nations”.
At the same time, it was easy for me to see why God needed
to remove the wrong people, habits and behavior patterns out of my life as
well. Like Abraham these were the
obstacles that were preventing me from becoming all I was intended to be. It also gave me such great comfort to see how
good God is to us, even when we screw up and make mistakes and even when we are
purposely, blatantly, disobedient, He still doesn’t give up on us. He is still there, faithfully, mercifully, guiding
us, protecting us, and not just providing for us, but surprisingly, He still abundantly
blesses us.
I also know that any real, lasting change is a process, we
live our life in stages and fortunately, God never wastes any of our experiences,
He uses all of our experiences, the good and the bad, our triumphs as well as
our mistakes, to work for our good. But
honestly, I will share with you that my prayer and wish on the day of my birth
was, “Lord, please help me to “Change my Default Settings”, starting today,
because I don’t want to spend my entire lifetime, and wait until my 99th
birthday before I finally reach my fullest potential and become the person that
I was put here to become.
