A close friend speaks a word that challenges your work ethic. At first you want to deflect and uphold your cause, but the words fail to pervade as you recognize the truth in what was spoken. You are prone to distraction, a bit lackadaisical when it comes to the appropriation of fruitful time management, and you are beginning to feel a tension with your boss for reasons that even you understand as being merited. Your friend is a trusted one and so you could most readily seek out their keen insight. Yet your light bulb moment of admitting all that you were perhaps suspect of, but had not yet been confronted in, is halted.
Your initial bout of wanting to grapple in self defense is then handed over to shame instead of appreciation. You honor the truth presented, but can do no more than wallow in an overwhelming lack of self worth. Your revealing enlightenment dies at pity.
You find yourself admiring a friends demeanor with their children. They seem ridiculously patient, marvelously attentive, and gentle even in their firmness. While you tend to react quickly to your children and are more aggravated by their needs than engaged with them, you find great inspiration in your friends unintentionally laid example. Yet rather than prodding for some well tuned insight, or considering ways that you could adjust your natural parental responses, you begin to jot down a mental list of any potentially founded reason that your friend has an advantage to which you do not have access. They have had the time to develop patience because they do not work nearly the hours you do. Their children have had an easier manner since birth and so surely the struggles you face in the home are not what they need to deal with on a consistent basis. Their children are a touch younger. Their children are a touch older. Their children have a bigger house to roam. Their Dad is probably around more to help out…
The list is merely subject to where you let your mind roam, but no matter the content, you have halted any plight towards growth in that you have instead chosen to compare and even covet. If only they walked in your shoes, or if only you could walk in theirs, and all at once your source of inspiration dies at presumption.
The billion dollar question that we spoke of in our last writing remains. And as promised, there will be no Venmo button at the bottom of this writing to plead for your generosity. My thoughts in response to the question at hand come from no more than personal experience of longing for my own self improvement and being in positions of leadership where engaging in someone’s growth fell naturally alongside the role.
So in the case that we continue to agree that both you and I need to make character growth a consistent part of life, what actually moves you to grow in the areas that need growing? And by the way, we’re not talking growth in areas of entrepreneurship or social media marketing. We are not concerned in this context by ways that you could better strategize the growth of your business by learning from other business owners or unearth the practices needed to cultivate a larger Instagram following. All well and good, mind you, in the conversations which appeal to them, but we are getting a bit more personal than that.
We are talking about the depths of your soul. The places where maturity holds more weight than mere success. The change that demands humility before emulating attainment.
So with this critical piece of agreement in mind, how do we obtain the change that prods us?
If criticism, even when beginning as a healthy dose of prompted self-examination, does not lead to growth of any kind, it will have no where to go except feeling the shame of what you are not.
If sources of inspiration, even though carrying a beautiful glimpse of what growth in that area could look like, stops at merely spectating, it will have no other choice but to convince you that they hold an advantage which you will never be so privileged to have accompany your plight.
How then, with the temptations of each side so readily accessed, do we move beyond the pitfalls and into change?
By recognizing that we cannot undertake to change alone.
Although many have accomplished such hurdles by their own volition, the path is a harder one, walked by few and often after an extreme experience that weighed on them so significantly that it carried their motivation to push forward without much assistance. You remember our friend from two writings ago who found himself in a hospital bed and the experience pulled him immediately towards the lifestyle change required of him to preserve his very life. Most change required of us seems menial, but is imperative to preventing an inevitable bomb further on down the road.
If you don’t tend to your health when you only have a few bad habits to adjust, the work will be harder when a heart attack serves as your motivator.
If you don’t speak into your marriage when the first red flag rears its head, the effort required to save it when it needs saving will be far more rigorous.
If you don’t engage with your children when they are young and dependent, drawing them to you when they are teenagers will feel nothing short of desperate.
Wisdom is best reared along the way rather than hoping for it to save you when all feels lost.
This is where you turn it over. Where you recognize that whatever your preferred motivator, personal criticism or outside inspiration, you may never move beyond the pitfalls of each if kept tucked away in your own patterns of thought.
This is where you turn to someone close to you. A parent, a spouse, a trustworthy friend. This is where you honor the triggers that have the potential of halting any forward movement towards self improvement, and where you come to acknowledge the fact that you are susceptible to them. Where you invite someone into the story of yourself and permit the privilege of their relationship to be far more than an ear to grumble towards or feet to party with.
Many relationships can stand as a place for banter alongside a chilled beverage, but few can become a resting place for the best pieces of you yet to be uncovered.
Several years ago, as an employed leader at a local church, I found myself in the place of holding accountable a volunteer and friend that struggled with overindulging in drink. She knew it was starting to get out of hand, and so I faithfully called her on a consistent basis to check in and reassure her of her noble efforts. Although we were indeed friends, we were not particularly close, and I found our times of being together more in correlation with my position of leadership. Although humbled by the place of trust I was given in her life, and while I feel our conversations surely lent themselves to her journey in abstinence, there was something in me that knew it wouldn’t stick. And although one area of accountability does not need to last indefinitely, those intimate relationships are the ones that will have you coming back more often and most willingly for this essential component of growth that has no easy replacement.
In other words, you don’t need someone on staff at a church to help you navigate the well plodded illumination of your character. You don’t need to have scheduled calls or weekly meetings to make a change. Indeed there are scenarios where such is required, but often times they come when someone has gone too far. A taste for alcohol turned to alcoholism. A lust in the eyes turned to pornography. But we are not going so far as this for the purpose of our time together. We are engaging the pieces of us that could easily be sloughed off as culturally normal, not-that-big-a-deal, or faring few consequences. Apart from the truth that all holes we dig for ourselves begin there, alcoholism and pornography included, the end result of a great many number of personal bends may seem less detrimental.
And so this in mind we can choose to take or leave personal growth at our own whim, but if indeed we long to turn life into legacy and story into inspiration, then we would do best to start with all that at first seems socially acceptable or insignificant.
Yet engage the intimacy of a close friend, inviting them into who you are and all you hope to become, and accountability feels less about double backing to tend to a regret, and more about flourishing in ways you didn’t yet know possible.
Still there is one more corner to turn. Self-imposed criticisms and stories that were found most inspiring are naturally brought up in conversation with those whom you know well, and those who are equally invested in you for more than just casual chit chat over a cup of coffee. You ask one another questions about aspirations and personal endeavors, and the concept of accountability might even present itself when the words “hold me to it” or “just be real with me” are uttered and whole heartedly accepted.
This second turn can be made in tandem, yet perhaps made far less, as it dares to remind us how desperately dependent we are, and in a time where independence is otherwise unapologetically celebrated.
This is where we turn to the mystery of the super natural made known in the uncovering of the Holy Spirit.
I recognize I might lose some of you here, for I have even seen a departing of those in the church where the Holy Spirit is involved. Perhaps because we live in an era where we feel remarkably in control of all that surrounds us, and when that illusion is threatened – a foreign virus that spreads across the globe for instance – we succumb to fear and discord until we can gain enough knowledge to secure control. The third personage of God is far from in our control. And though much has been revealed of Him to us, our capacity to understand is rather limited. He is God after all, and if He did not hold an element of the unexplainable, a rather poor God He would make.
I will go no further here than to say that in all the moments of self awareness and perspective shifting inspiration, in all the temptations to shame or devalue or covet or compare, in all the most intimate of friendships that lead to the most beautiful of transformations, there are scales upon our eyes which will fall only when we find ourselves willing to bend to our birthright.
Accept your adoption of sonship and so work out your freedom with awe and admiration, or carry the heaviness of attainment to the bewilderment of your soul.
EXPOSITION: If intimate friendships (accountability) and the guarantor of our inheritance (the Holy Spirit) are our answers to the billion dollar question of moving beyond the pitfalls of criticism and comparison and move towards tangible change, then perhaps a moment to be completely honest here is crucial. You’ve determined the motivator that your personality would deem most effective (January 31st writing). You’ve acknowledged what temptation you most readily fall prey to that halts effective change (February 7th writing). Are you willing to undertake that which will turn life into legacy and story into inspiration? Are you willing to risk your dependence on the self for the sake of seeing clearly?
RISE: Begin with a conversation. With a friend. With your Creator. There are no rules here. No billions of dollars worth of book sales to first establish before the words given become credible. A starting point of honest seeking goes much deeper than well polished strategy.
DENOUEMENT: “Search me, God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.” – a song of King David