Shaping Your 2015, Together with God (Part 2)

“Our common goal is the attainment of the love of God, and in order to fulfill it we must make a long journey. Naturally you need stimulation to spur yourselves on to attain that goal faster. The person who is really making efforts toward that goal is truly a happy person.” Rev SMM, February 12, 1978

We continue today to look at how we get into shaping our 2015, together with God.

Here is a link to the message on Youtube (but the notes might be more useful.)

Who here has made some goals for 2020? Who has painted a vision of where they would like their life to be in say 5 or 10 years time?

Has anyone here ever had a project that they worked on over say a 10 year period with a group of people? It requires commitment, it’s exciting, fulfilling.

I think probably few of us have the confidence to plan that far ahead. But probably most of the things we would like to see realised in our life are not achievable in just one or two years…..(there is a tension between the present & the future)

Having a long-term goal, that you chip away at every year, means the things that you dream of are doable, they can happen, they are possible.

So if you didn’t make any clear plans for 2015, don’t worry, today is a good day to start. If you haven’t painted your vision of 2020, then 2015 is still a good year to get out the canvas and the paint and the brushes and start to paint that personal, or family vision.

How do you get started?

Just start by working out how old you will be in 2020, and how old will your family be? That can get you thinking.

Last week we looked at 4 points towards planning your vision for 2015. Here are some more steps to take in this process for shaping your year:

5. Identify the barriers.

“I have not had an easy path in life; obstacles have always been in my path. But when obstacles appear, I go over them and recreate the original pattern.” Rev SMM

As we sit here and we consider where we would like to be in our different life situations by the end of this year, (some examples… work, family, our home, leading someone to God)

An important step is to identify the barriers between us and our goals.

What is the barrier between you and your vision, between you and your dream for the next year or two or ten years of your life?

The question we want to ask is this:

Why don’t I have it already?

There may be relational problems, financial barriers, or educational barriers. There may be emotional barriers that keep you from your dream.

“Maybe if only I had more self discipline then I could achieve all my goals.”

Faith says, “yes I see the problem but I believe God is bigger, more powerful than the problem.” Our Faith doesn’t deny the problem, it just believes God is bigger than those roadblocks.

When you look inside yourself what are the internal issues that are going to be critical this year for you to go further on your journey, to get closer to the destination that you have in your mind?

I know for me one emotional problem I would like to resolve is sometimes having a short temper. When I prayed to God about this, I heard him saying: “look to your wife for an example of how to not lose your cool, because she knows how to stay calm, and not react to situations too quickly.”

Perhaps for some of us if we look hard we notice we are a bit too satisfied with our life, or our self. Maybe I have a bit of a prideful attitude lurking around somewhere in my heart, perhaps my humility has been worn down by a bit of arrogance springing up in me. Maybe it is a reaction to something that happened or perhaps it has been there for a long time just waiting for the chance to grow, and I’ve never noticed it.

And maybe it means that I have lost some of my ability to really listen to other people; maybe it means I have become a bit needy, a bit greedy.

So, if that’s you, and your thinking maybe that it is just v faintly ringing some bells for you, not alarm bells, but a warning bell just off in the distance, then think how solving that problem could help remove a barrier between you and your goals.

…then what could I do to address those attitudes, to realign my perspective with something that renews my humility my sense of gratitude.

Maybe you have been saying thank you to God in your prayers around the dinner table with the family, but actually, you haven’t experienced a deep sense of gratitude for a while.

So what is it for you? What is your heart closed to, what is your heart in need of in 2015?

Unless we tackle these internal barriers, then I think it is unlikely that we will achieve our goals, see our visions and dreams realised.

6. Create a step by step plan.

To reach your goals, you must plan it one step at a time. You need to think through a course of action. A plan has three parts.

 A plan has steps - deadlines - schedule

So whether it’s steps towards your goals or a particular strategy for removing those internal barriers, we need to be specific.

We will need to have tangible things that we agree with our self that we are going to do, we need to put a date on this stuff. It needs to be in our schedule.

7. Be patient and persistent.

If you have a long term goal over 5-10 years you need persistence and patience. If you want to create something that is special it isn’t going to happen overnight. The bigger your goal, the longer it will take. The more significant your goal, the more time and energy will be involved.

When you think about God as a personal God who created for the purpose of a personal relationship, then we see a model of persistence and patience. I know God is beyond time, but still we see his meticulous patient approach:

The thing he most wanted to see (his children), he created last, at the end of billions of years of watching his universe evolve.

Sometimes the thing we most want has to wait until we can create the environment in which it can flourish and blossom.

Let me give you an example.

One of my goals/visions for 2020 answers the following question:

Where do we as the Coopers want to be in our relationships, our faith, our mission as a family by 2020?

Our culture as a family is one where we share a common language and vocabulary through which we are able to communicate with one another about our mission in life.

As a family we have a deep sense of where we are hoping to reach in our lives together. We feel we are working towards a shared destination that we have discussed. We have found practical

ways in which we can be conscious of our core beliefs, and have looked at how to strengthen our values – we understand the difference between notional values and the ones we practice in our daily life.

We have listened to each other’s hopes and dreams and seen how to incorporate all of those things into our common family vision…..etc

Everyone wants a united family, that’s got deep roots, and that allows everyone to prosper, etc.

But it’s not something that happens over night, and sometimes we are not patient, we try to force it, to artificially manifest it.

But it doesn’t really work if we do that. We have to be patient, we have to be persistent. We have to be generous.

So over the last year I have been learning how to make our family meetings and prayers, when we read different things together, a time in which everyone is a willing participant, rather than a prisoner to my agenda.

8. Get a team behind you for support.

You’re never going to reach your goal on your own. You’re never going to fulfill your vision by yourself. Success is never, never, never a one man show. It takes teamwork. It takes cooperation. Why are other people so important to your goals?

Because God wants to teach you how to love other people, which is maybe in the end more important than what you want to outwardly accomplish.