Be All You Can Be: A Challenge to Stretch Your God-Given Potential (9 page)

•
Examine
your life at the moment. The first step toward making your dream come true is to find out where you are right now. That takes close scrutiny.

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Exchange
all of your little options for one big dream. Every dream has its price.

•
Expose
yourself to successful people. It is true that birds of a feather flock together.

•
Express
your belief in your dream. Write it down or talk about it frequently.

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Expect
opposition to your dream. Every nitpicker who doesn’t have a dream will oppose yours. Regretfully, there are ten nitpickers for every person with a dream. You will never rid yourself of them. As long as you understand that, you won’t let them hinder you. Remember that those who have no dream cannot see yours, so to them it is impossible. You can’t have what you can’t see.

•
Exercise
all of your effort, all of your energy, toward the dream. It’s worth it. Pay that price.

•
Extract
every positive principle that you can from life. Constantly be on the lookout for anything that will enhance that dream.

•
Exclude
negative thinkers as close friends. You’re going to have some friends who are negative thinkers, and no doubt some are members of your family. But if their negative thinking drags you down, which it will, you don’t need to spend much time with them. There are people in my family and in my wife’s family who are spirit-dampeners. We have chosen, for the sake of our kids as well as ourselves, not to spend a lot of time with them. You may need to put some distance between yourself and your negativethinking friends.

•
Exceed
normal expectations to make your dream come true. If you’re to reach your dream, you’ll have to do that which is beyond the normal. Dreams are not achieved by average energy.

•
Exhibit
an attitude that is confident. I believe that if you are outwardly confident, you will become more confident inwardly. The way we act outwardly affects what we are inwardly.

•
Explore
every possible avenue to reach your dream. Don’t let any detour or dead-end street stop you on your way to a dream God has given you. There are more routes up a mountain than just the east side. Go around to the south side. See what else you can do.

•
Extend
a helping hand to someone who had a similar dream, and both of you will climb together. Mountain climbing is not an individual sport. It’s a team sport. One holds the line for the other. As we hold the lines for others, we can all make it to the top, and our dreams can come true.

chapter 5

THE BIGGER THEY ARE, THE HARDER THEY FALL

I
WANT TO BRING SOME PRINCIPLES OUT OF THE
story of David and Goliath that will help us to charge the giants in our lives in a more effective way. Before you read any further, stop and think for a minute: What is your biggest problem? What giant is standing in your path?

This chapter is dedicated to enabling you to be victorious over some seemingly insurmountable barrier or difficulty in your life. Victory requires more than positive thinking; positive thinking is nothing more than a thought pattern. It requires more than enthusiasm; enthusiasm is only a feeling. It even requires more than action. Victory comes about when we think right about our problems, feel right about our problems, and then act right about our problems. We need more than just a positive mental attitude.

I read an interesting article recently about Karl Wallenda, the great tightrope artist. He died a few years ago in Puerto Rico, after a seventy-five-foot fall from a tightrope. On one occasion he said, “Being on a tightrope is living. Everything else is waiting.” He lived for the thrill of the moment. Wallenda’s wife, who was also an aerialist, had some interesting observations concerning what happened before that fateful fall. She said, “All Karl thought about for three straight months prior to walking across the tightrope was falling. It was the first time he’d ever thought about that. And it seemed to me that he put all of his energies into not falling, rather than walking the tightrope.” Mrs. Wallenda added that her husband went so far as to personally supervise the installation of the tightrope, making absolutely certain that the guy wires were secure. He had always trusted his crew to do this in the past.

He walked the tightrope with the fear of falling in his mind, and his thinking created his feeling of insecurity; we know what happened. He poured all his energy into not falling, and that’s exactly what happened to him. I think that’s what often happens to us when we face giants. We look at the Goliaths in our lives in the same way the army of Israel looked at them, and our thoughts focus on not being defeated. That was all they could think about—not being killed, not being destroyed. When we focus on the pitfalls rather than the prize, we often fall right in. We should never allow ourselves to lose sight of our goal, for we may never see it again.

How did David kill Goliath? With a slingshot and a stone. We need some stones to ward off the giants in our lives too. Stone number one—check your cause. That is the first thing I would encourage you to do. Identify your purpose. What is the cause that makes you need to tackle your problems? Is it worthy enough to consume your energy, effort, time, commitment? Is it worth the risk you’ll be taking? You can be sure that David had a cause. When he arrived on the scene, the first thing he found was a very frightened Israelite army. The second thing he saw was Goliath—and he realized why they were scared to death. David had a giant of a problem to deal with.

I’ve found that little minds have wishes, and great minds have causes. Many of us are like Woody Allen, who said, “No matter what I’m working on, I’d like to be doing something else.” I know a lot of people like that! They have never developed a purpose great enough to hold them steady or a commitment strong enough to make a real difference. Behind every great accomplishment is a purpose, not a wish. Our purpose is what keeps us from giving up. Behind every enjoyable experience is a purpose, because purpose puts the seasoning in life, and makes it tasty and exciting.

Here’s an acrostic that may help you understand and remember what a sense of purpose will do for you, how it will lift you out of the realm of the ordinary. A purpose will cause you to:

Pray more than the ordinary person.

Unite more than the ordinary person.

Risk more than the ordinary person.

Plan more than the ordinary person.

Observe more than the ordinary person.

Sacrifice more than the ordinary person.

Expect more than the ordinary person.

A purpose will cause you to spend more time in prayer. If your purpose is bigger than you are, you’ll continually need to ask God for his wisdom and strength. Prayer is how the power of God is unleashed. We need to look at prayer as taking hold of God’s eagerness, not overcoming God’s reluctance. Throughout the Scriptures we are challenged to boldly claim victory through prayer: “Call to Me and I will answer you, and I will tell you great and mighty things, which you do not know” (Jer. 33:3). “Whatever you ask in My name, that will I do, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If you ask Me anything in My name, I will do it” (John 14:13–14). “Therefore I say to you, all things for which you pray and ask, believe that you have received them, and they will be granted you” (Mark 11:24). Through prayer we have the power and privilege to be used by God for a great purpose. The disciples of the first century knew how to pray and claim in faith the power of our omnipotent God to help change the course of history. We serve the same God today.

A purpose will cause you to unite—to look for others with similar goals. A good example of this is found in Genesis at the time of the building of the Tower of Babel. Because the people were united in a purpose, they were able to do things that had never been done before—extraordinary things.

A purpose challenges us to
risk
more. We’re willing to put ourselves out a little farther on the limb; we’re willing to get closer to our Goliaths.

If we have a purpose, we will do extraordinary
planning
to see it accomplished. If a cause is bigger than we are, it will require our best organizational skills. Goals aren’t met by accident.

A purpose also makes us extraordinarily observant. It makes us more sensitive to people and needs around us. We will look for opportunities to move forward.

Having a purpose enables us to sacrifice beyond the call of duty. We’re willing to lay more on the line. And last, having a purpose allows us to expect more than we ordinarily would.

What I’m really saying is this: Purpose makes the difference between the ordinary and the extraordinary. A person with a purpose does things out of the ordinary, above average. Personality doesn’t make a person extraordinary. Neither does intelligence nor education. What makes a person extraordinary is purpose—the consuming desire to accomplish something in life.

There was only one reason for David to charge Goliath: He had a purpose. The God of Israel was being ridiculed by the Philistines because the Israelites were afraid to tackle their problem. Was their God not able to help them? When we’re confronted by the Goliaths in our lives, what is it that makes us want to attack? Our first step should be to identify and examine our causes.

Not long ago, I picked up an article about a doctor who had studied the care of the elderly. He found that people who lived to be over one hundred years of age all had one thing in common. Now, I expected to read about healthful diets and disciplined exercise programs—subjects that make me uncomfortable. But that wasn’t it; the one thing these centenarians had in common was purpose. They each had a positive outlook on life. The future looked bright; they had a reason to live.

After we check our cause, we need to pick up the second stone with which to fight a Goliath: Count the cost. What’s it going to cost me to tackle this problem? When God measures a man, he puts the measuring tape around his heart, not his head. David not only knew what he wanted, which was Goliath, but he knew what he had to do to achieve his goals; he knew what it was going to cost him.

To defeat Goliath, David had to pay a twofold price. Number one, he had to pay the price of criticism. When he charged his giant, he was going to be criticized.

Now Eliab his oldest brother heard when [David] spoke to the men; and Eliab’s anger burned against David and he said, “Why have you come down? And with whom have you left those few sheep in the wilderness? I know your insolence and the wickedness of your heart; for you have come down in order to see the battle.” (1 Sam. 17:28)

Notice that the criticism leveled at David came from his brother. While his enemies laughed at him, his friends and relatives criticized him. They said things like, “You don’t belong here. You’re too young. You’re too inexperienced. You’re proud.”