Nick Meeder | Way Finders

There are many people I look up to who have achieved a level of success that I desire. Maybe they built a business, have a personal brand, an awesome product or service, or have a positive influence over people.   One thing that I struggle with that they have learned to overcome to some degree is choosing to not numb their mind. Particularly with a smart phone, computer, or television. They learned to confront their problems and solve them. You and I must learn to solve our own problems if we want to move forward in growth.   With social media and “reality” TV, many people, including myself, are now TRAINED for distraction. I desire the distraction because I do not have to feel the pain or hardship of solving my own problems in life. Have you ever found yourself doing this? Instead of doing what you should be doing, you find yourself distracted on interWebs? Next time your working on a project or in conversation with someone, see how many times you’re tempted to look at your phone or something to be distracted from what’s happening. Or, after a stressful situation or perhaps an argument, see if you try to go to social media to feel better. You may find that you’re not even conscious of what you’re choosing. That’s how you know your brain is trained in a behavioral rut.   So, instead of trying to process deeply and dig beneath the mirk and mud of life, I would rather not face the internal, emotional stress of confronting problems or thinking deeply and instead, check my smart phone to see what is happening on social media (and then another wretched thing starts to happen: I compare my life to what other people have or are doing, and become depressed that I don’t have those things).   This pattern does not yield the real happiness or results I’m looking for in life. How about you?   So, how to stop this? This is a plan you can follow that will give you a structure for changing your behavior of distraction. What pattern have you been struggling with and how are you overcoming it? Leave a comment if you’d like some help or add to any thoughts I’ve shared.  

It is easy to run away from pain. However, if you run from pain, you will not grow and become stronger. If a caterpillar is to hatch and become a butterfly, it must go through the struggle of breaking free from the cocoon. A bird hatching from an egg will die if it is helped out of its egg instead of having to struggle out of the egg. If you run from your pain, anger, frustration, hurt, sadness, or depression, you will never grow. You will die. You will keep repeating the same patterns in life and never move on or rise above.
You must learn to battle your bad attitudes towards your job, employer, or bosses. You must choose to submit to those in authority over you. Choose to do good and not let other people or your circumstances set your mood or attitude.

God knows that your faith is of more value than purified gold. He wants your faith to become more refined and pure. This only happens in the trials and the suffering as you submit and surrender yourself to God and do good instead of evil.

Focus on doing all the good you can do now in your present job. Find the opportunities for growth and exploit them as if you are working for the Lord.

Your internal thinking and disposition will determine what you do in any given situation. The key, therefore, is to become wise.

Wisdom is granted and given by God. He is the owner of it and by it he established the universe (Prov. 8).

Those who are wise understand that suffering is a great teacher. For in suffering the dross will surface and then can be removed, but only if you allow it.

I’ve observed people, when suffering from trials, try to hold onto the dross which surfaces from their life (that is, who they are and what they look to for fulfillment and salvation). For some odd reason, people fight to hold onto what they love. I suppose this is because when you identify who you are with what you love, and the thing that you love is being removed (the dross), the only natural disposition is to fight to hold onto that which gives you meaning and purpose.

Those who are wise have set Christ as the object of their love, for He can never be taken away. He is the ultimate realization of who an individual is and who God is. Christ is also the ultimate example of who we are to follow and become like. Christ suffered in the flesh, in order that he might learn submission and obedience to the Father (Phil 2:5-11, Heb 5:7-9, 12:1-11).

Let your suffering be a great instructor, for God is drawing out what He wants you to surrender in obedience to Him.

What dross is surfacing from your life? Are you holding on to it, or are you ready to become wise?

 

 

 

If you want a better life, then you must understand how you got to where you are today. Few people actually, really know how they got to where they are. Why is this? It is because the majority of people do not know how they make decisions.

I once thought I knew how to make good decisions. I thought I was making good decisions. However, something happened along the way. While I thought I was making good decisions, I ended up in a place in life that I did not want to be and I couldn’t understand how I got to where I was. Ever had the same thing happen?

I talked in the previous blog post of the importance for perspective. One thing we spend a lot of time on in a LifePlan is gaining perspective through something called “turning points.” A turning point is when your life is headed in one direction, something happens, and then your life goes in a different direction. Or, you are one way, then as a result of the turning point, you change (not necessarily 180 degrees, though). There are progressions of turning points, but they are a result of a turning point. There are positive and negative turning points in each of our lives.

Do this, plot out the turning points of you life starting as far back as you can remember where you were one way, or headed in a particular direction, and then you changed or went in a different direction. What was that event that caused it? This will take some time, so blog out an hour or two to do this. Ask yourself, ‘How did my life go in a different direction?’ or ‘How did I change as a result of this?’ ‘Is this a turning point or a progression of a turning point?’

Once you have your turning points plotted out, then create a matrix with your turning points across the top (x axis) and then the five areas of life (we call these “Life Domains”) along the left side (y axis) of a piece of paper. The five life domains are: Personal, Family, Vocation, Faith/Church/God, and Community. Once you have your spreadsheet drawn, go through each turning point and write out how each life domain was affected. Some of the Life Domains will not be filled in from young aged Turning Points.

After everything is plotted out and Life Domains are filled in, step back. Reflect on it. Pray and ask God to reveal some truth that He wants you to see. What patterns emerge? What patterns emerged from your personal domain and your family domain? What’s missing in your turning points? What was wrong in your turning points across the life domains? What was good? What was bad? How did you respond to certain stimulus? Did you react to the stimulus? Were you making emotional decisions? How has this turning point caused you to interpret other similar situations and did you make the same decision, or did you pendulum swing to the other side? Seek to know the truth? Fear is a great force when coupled with our imagination. What fears emerged from your turning points? How has fear held you back? How has it caused you to avoid certain experiences based on your turning points? Ask yourself lots of questions and invite God to show you what He’s been doing in your life. Has He been at work this whole time and you didn’t know? Or, do you believe that He as been absent and doesn’t care about you? Seek truth. How did your parents influence you? Who did you allow to influence your life?

Once you’ve learned as much truth as you can from how you’ve gotten to where you are today, rate each turning point on a scale of one to ten (one being very negative, and ten being very positive). You might find that some events were very negative initially, but with time, you look back and see how the pain yielded good fruit. Once each life turning point as been rated, graph it out and see what more truth emerges.

Have you been on a roller coaster ride going from one high to the next? Have you had a lot of negative turning points? Have your experiences caused you to expect the next negative thing in life to happen to you? Have you been self-sabotaging? What have you learned? What should you watch out for? What has colored the interpretation of your reality?

Question: What have you learned from your turning points? Please leave a comment.

If any of this helped you, or if you have any question, please leave a comment or contact me and I will respond to your question. You might also consider going through LifePlan. Click on the link above, “Get a LifePlan.”

Jesus said that He came that you “…may have life and have it abundantly” (John 10:10). When Jesus walked the earth, He lived a perfectly executed LifePlan. He knew His purpose and executed it perfectly (John 5:19-20, & 18:37).

Jesus is our example to follow.

In the beginning, Adam and Eve were created in God’s likeness. It must have been a marvelous thing to behold! However, Adam and Eve sinned, and through them, we all sinned (Romans 3:23, 5:12). You and I had a huge problem. We deserved the punishment and the wrath of God for our sin (Romans 1:18; Ephesians 2:1-3). Yet, God so loved the world that He sent His only Son to take the punishment we deserved (John 3:15-17 & 10:17-18).

If Christ is your friend and you call God your Father, then you should know your purpose. Yes, there is a general purpose, that you be sanctified and glorify God, as well as other things. Yet, maybe you don’t know how that works if you’re a stay at home mom, or if you’re an auto mechanic. How does that glorify God? Are you glorifying God?

Maybe if you could discover your God given, specific purpose, and a process to implement, maintain, and renew it, then you could live the abundant life Jesus talked about. That is what LifePlan helps you do. However, you don’t simply arrive there in two hours. It is two full days. Why is it this long? Because most people never take the time to gain perspective. Jesus did this because He consistently broke away and had times of prayer and replenishment with His Father. He was even transfigured and talked with Moses and Elijah – talk about gaining perspective, I’m sure Jesus was able to gain fantastic perspective (Matthew 17:1-13). This leads to a question many do not know the answer to: what is perspective?

I compare it to driving 75 mph on the highway. Imagine driving 75 mph along the highway. There are trees whizzing by. The landscape is changing. It feels like you’re moving pretty fast. It feels like you’re headed towards your destination at a very quick pace. The beautiful thing about driving is that you can take in a scene as it comes. Maybe you crest over a hill or mountain and can see a beautiful creation on a summer day. The farms have cows grazing lazily on the green hillside. There’s the red barn where hay is stored. There’s the fencing to keep the cows in. Then the next scene comes and it is a housing development. Maybe not as serene as a farm, but you take in the details of all the houses, their configuration to each other, and you wonder, ‘Who lives there? What does their house look like on the inside? What kind of people are they? Etc.’ Before you know it, you’re at your destination with all of these amazing views passing quickly.

Now, imagine you’re in a jet at 15,000 feet in the air watching that little car on the ground traveling at 75 mph. To the people in the car, they are traveling fast in comparison to their surroundings. However, to you in the jet, the car is traveling fairly slow because you have a greater vantage point for comparison. You can see everything at one time. You can see the beginning, the end destination, as well as all the things in between. You see perfectly where they are now, the accident 5 miles ahead, and all of the squiggly turns they went through to get up the side of the mountain 10 miles ago.

That is the understanding of what perspective is. Most people are moving in life and their only frame of reference is their ground level surroundings, 75 mph, reference point. They do not know how they have gotten to where they are, nor fully understand where they are at the present. Perspective is gained when you take a 15,000 foot view of where you are presently in life, and how you got there.

This is where a lot of truth surfaces about your life in the LifePlan process. You begin to see your decision making process. You begin to see what has shaped you into the person you are and how God has worked in your life to bring you to where you are. You discover things that have held you back in life. You discover positive and negative relationships and influencers in your life. This is very important because in order to live the life God has meant for you to live, you have to be able to recognize the good and avoid the negative things that will trip you up in the future.

Once you have a full grasp of where you stand in life and how you got there, then it’s time to discover and craft your future. That is no easy task, which is another reason why it takes two days, and even then isn’t fully realized because God will continue to reveal more of His truth to you in His timing. Since this is about your purpose for existing and not what you want it to be, God is the only One Who can reveal that. Thus, we pray together and rely on the Holy Spirit to guide and reveal the truth of your life in each module. You craft your purpose statement based on what clues God has put in your life and how He has made you. For some of you, that sounds scary because you feel that you don’t have any clues. That is simply not true (which is another thing you’ll discover with perspective – the lies you’ve believed and the truth to combat them)! How can He who knit you in your mother’s womb not have put clues in your heart and life as to His purpose for you?

If you’re searching for your purpose, or have had a burning desire in your heart to live the life God has for you, I would ask you to seek God and ask Him if LifePlan is what He wants you to go through. He created you to live an abundant life. It’s time for you to start living it! Many of you will feel that you’re not good enough to discover your purpose. Believe me, God WANTS you to discover the purpose for which He created you!

Question: What would an abundant life look or feel like for you? Please leave a comment.