God has made us capable of so much that we do not realize most of the time. I believe He has gifted us with the power to shape much of our lives as He has given us the ability and choice of how to think about our lives.If you wake up and say, “Today’s gonna suck” there’s a good chance today will suck…for you at least. Same goes for how we reflect on our days. You can recount your day and focus your energy on all that went wrong or what you did not do or achieve or obtain, or you can go through hour by hour looking for everyt bless you appreciate and thank God for each one of them. At the end of the day, you can check to see if you’re “Gimme gimme gimme” or “Have have have.”

In these God-given ways, we can have much say in our reality.

Energy definitely does flow where attention goes. Have you heard of the “Observer Effect”? Not to be confused with The Ripple Effect, it refers to the changes that the act of observation will make on a phenomenon being observed. At the quantum level this is super wacky stuff. Positions of particles change just because someone looks at them! Weird. Anyway, is this perhaps a small clue God has allowed us to find to demonstrate how much we affect our own reality? It’s not that we’re God, but that God made us to interact with reality in this way and affect it.

Many times we do give ourselves too much credit and think we’re pure awesomeness. But sometimes we don’t give ourselves credit enough. Ultimatey, we don’t give God credit enough for making us such incredible beings. Jesus said we would do even greater things than He did, but we sit around thinking “Poor me” as if there’s nothing we can do about it.

As said yesterday, I firmly believe He has given us the gift to “change our mind at any time.” We can turn to God at anytime. We can choose to look at our life through the lens of gratitude at any moment. If this is not true…well just shoot me now and put me out of my uncontrollable misery. It does not mean necessarily that it’s super easy, but it can be done, and needs to be redone over time until the habit is formed.

Here is the power of one thing at a time. Habit formation and habit change. You can start forming any habit you want to form right now today, if you so choose to do so. It’s a matter of where you put your energy, and on how many things you put your energy toward.

A double-minded person is unstable in everything they do.

According to Greg McKeown, author of Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less, there’s a reason why many successful people don’t automatically become very successful. And here I think of success in many areas of life, not just running a business. He calls the reason “the clarity paradox,” which he sums up in four predictable phases:

Phase 1: When we really have clarity of purpose it leads to success.

Phase 2: When we have success, it leads to more options and opportunities.

Phase 3: When we have increased options and opportunities, it leads to diffused efforts.

Phase 4: Diffused efforts undermine the very clarity that lead to our success in the first place.

McKeown concludes, “Curiously, and overstating the point in order to make it, success is a catalyst for failure.”

So we see the absolute necessity of being single-mindedly focused and keeping that way through to the end so we finish well.

Seventeen years ago, I was obsessed with getting my bodyweight to 200 lbs. I wanted to be like the bigger guys in the gym. There was a year in which all I thought about seemed to be getting to 200. I ate constantly, drank weight gainer shakes, lifted crushingly heavy weights all the live long day, and guess what? I did it. Energy flowed where direction…goed. It worked, I stepped on the scale and saw “200.” Now I’m one of the big guys in the gym. Well La De Freakin’ Da! Who cares? What a dumb, vain goal looking back. I mean it was fun, but I’m not sure what my getting to 200 lbs. had to do with the healing of the nations. No regrets, i’m just saying’…

What if my goal had been to become more like Christ? To be one with the Father. To be an unconditional love machine. To judge less. What if we set more worthy goals in life like those and focused our attention on them in a single laser-like manner?

I think there would be more peace in the world.

By the way, now I’m trying to get down to 192. But I’m not trying too hard!

In the Name of Jesus,
Soli Deo Gloria