We are all a by-product of the lives we have lived up to this point.  I left a very dysfunctional home and decided to take a path 180 degrees from everything I had ever known up to the point of my salvation in college.  It wasn’t until I was married that I realized that the muscle memory of my life experiences would inexplicably and without intention, show up in my every day life.

One of the beautiful opportunities of our walk with God is that all of those experiences, even the worst ones, can be redeemed.  As redeemed, they are monetized into a currency that allows us to live more powerfully and have greater impact on others.

For it is for freedom, that He set us free.  It was always intended that we would be unburdened from the yoke of slavery, that we would take our place as sons and daughters of the King, and as those sons and daughters of a King, we would benevolently rule over this Kingdom on His behalf.

Freedom is the cry of all our hearts.  It is our destiny.

Understanding my own identity as a man and understanding all the gaps in my masculine journey to adulthood was a necessary, but very challenging journey.  There was a natural progression of things I needed to learn, know, and understand, that I had largely missed in my matriculation from boy to man.  It is the same for nearly every honest man or woman I have ever come across.

The revelation of all of this, had me doubling back to fill in gaps in my developmental journey.  It also had me aggressively seeking out the wisdom of old age.  It was in this season that I began to see myself as an “Inverse Abraham,” a son of many fathers.  I needed and cried out for maturity, wisdom, and mentoring.

Everyone is trying to climb the mountain.  We are all looking to get higher, achieve, and get to whatever we define “more” to be.  On the way to the summit, however, very few of us divert off onto the less worn paths.  The paths that lead into the clouds with unknown destinations.  Very few leave the “what everyone is doing” to find the “what we most need to do”.

Very few look past getting the “more” and “better” to work on becoming the “more” and “better”

Very few realize that the path to the abundant life requires having the temerity of spirit to ask others to identify the things that we cannot see, embrace what we hear, and then go to work on restoring the things that aren’t as they should be.  That takes humility, courage, and sincerity.

hyper-local [hahy-per-loh-kuh l] 
Information oriented around a well-defined community with its primary focus directed toward the concerns of the population in that community.

It is one of those terms you typically hear associated with hipster restaurants and grocery stores, but is now starting to gain some broader appeal.  During the recent Olympics, Subway got into the act by positioning the concept around all their stores.

One of the first tried-and-true marketing techniques I first heard when I got involved with a consumer replacement home contractor was “good-better-best.”  In other words, we don’t have any bad options, just good ones.  And not only that, we have a better one and even a better one than that (if you are the kind of person who desires having the best available).

He was sort of unnerving, but in a way that made me totally comfortable.  Even in this first meeting, he seemed to know more about me (or at least more of the things that really mattered) than I knew myself.  He didn’t seem to need anything from me or particularly care what I thought about him.  That was the unnerving part.  

The fact that he cared so deeply about the deepest things about me was incredibly disruptive, but intriguing at the same time.  It was as if I had stumbled into a conversation I had been desperate to have, but didn’t know I needed.  The fact that I was 23 years into a successful banking career didn’t seem to faze him.  He knew I was born to be a professional coach and referred to me that way in our very first meeting.

My friend Jeff played piano with Tim McGraw for almost two decades.  When he started to look into recording on his own, he met with some industry types to talk about getting singed to a record deal.  They told him they had to figure out his potential commercial viability by calculating the strength of his following as an artist.  

Believe it or not Facebook follows, Twitter traffic, number of likes, fan emails to his artist website, etc. all had a numerical value.  But the thing that was worth the most… many, many order of magnitude beyond all the rest… was hand written (snail mail) letters from fans.

Someone taking the time to bypass all the convenience and impersonality of the much easier technological methods of communication, reflected a depth of feeling and interest that dwarfed the others.  

During a recent vacation to Colorado, I fulfilled a lifelong dream… crossed one of those things off my shrinking bucket list.  On the day that Young Life’s Trailwest Ranch was waiting to receive hundreds of visitors from dozens of families, they invited me to speak to their army of volunteers and staff.  I spent some time in a coffee shop in Buena Vista trying to capture my thoughts and ideas.  Typically, my heart lands on reminding people that they have something profound and amazing about them that uniquely reflects the Creator in a way that no one else can.

Living in San Antonio, we have had a front row seat on a selfless life expression of another sort.  In an industry where arrogance, flash, and self-aggrandizement seems to be the barometer for success, Tim Duncan chose a different path.  His recent retirement prompted dozens of tributes.  Most of the tributes focus on his selfless play, his unassuming manner, and how much better he made everyone around him.  They obviously point to the five NBA championships during his career, but the more astounding statistics are around the sustained excellence of the team through his career.

It is around 5 AM on a Saturday morning.  When I first checked the clock it had a 4 handle.  Experience tells me that trying to find my way back into some state of slumber is futile.  My head is spinning.  There was a season when my mind didn’t rest as a result of the usual things:

• Will my marriage make it?

• How badly have I screwed up the raising of my kids?

• Will I ever really be able to retire?  Am I really supposed to?

• Should I be doing something else with my life?

Those aren’t the things that tend to waken me anymore.  It is more about thoughts, ideas, concepts, hopes, and my deepest desires. 

Making bold moves (not the relatively minor ones that most of us make that result in little change) is how we find a deeper life in God.  We learn to know Him more in the unknown of our decisions and the resulting consequences.  That is kind of the point right?  If we remove the risk and add every contingency to make sure there is no opportunity for failure, where is the need for any kind of faith?

I stopped at a convenience store just down the street from the golf course where I would be speaking at a Chamber of Commerce luncheon.  I was a little behind schedule, but needed to stop for some aspirin due to a piercing headache.  I never expected I would find a line six people deep at this time of day.

I’ve been working on being more patient with some success, but given the circumstances there was a good chance I wasn’t going to pass this test.  There was a young girl checking people out and another employee standing beside her watching and giving her instructions.

The reality is that none of us arrive at this place without intention or a journey.  When you excavate your own life as well as the prior generations, they carry powerful clues.  In our SummitTrek LifePlan process we help everyone see how God has been intending and speaking through your story, experiences, hopes and dreams.  The evidence is all there waiting to be unearthed and acknowledged.

A more clear, fulfilling, and powerful life awaits on the other side.  If you desire clarity and an understanding of the best way forward for your organization or your family, it must begin with first finding the same for your own life.

This morning, I listened to the podcast of a man grieving the death of his beloved friend.  This man is a spiritual giant, a father of sorts to me.  His grief deeply affected me, almost caught me off guard.  Despite his deep understanding of eternity and beautifully powerful, reconciled, and abiding friendship with the man, he was almost paralyzed by his heartache.

In some strange way, I am grieving my father’s loss this morning though different eyes as a result... more the eyes of my heart.  And I am feeling the precious, consoling, holy pain of loss.  I am aware, for the first time, that I didn’t speak at my father’s funeral due to something far deeper than my love, conviction, and great hope of eternity.  I didn’t speak because I didn’t yet know how to grieve.

I am not a collector, a saver, or a hoarder.  I like a simple few things and don’t have need for very much else.  I have 10 of the same kind of shirt that I wear all the time to almost any occasion (much to the consternation of my wife and one of my partners).  I don’t have a laundry list of things that I am hoping to get.  In fact, every year my wife asks me what I want for Father’s Day (I just celebrated my 25th one of those).  I have answered that question a couple of dozen times exactly the same way: I want to hear from my children.

It is rare that I meet with a business leader where this idea from Lencioni doesn’t enter the conversation.  I describe it as the proverbial “perfect storm” for high integrity leaders.  Not only are you hard-wired to help others (when you help others the mesolimbic pathway allows for dopamine to reward you with good feelings), but it is an imperative of the gospel and simply good business.  Getting our teams to focus on changing other’s lives is a “win” by any measure.

If you are married, I know you have.  Before I learned to understand and appreciate the incredibly valuable and unique perspective my wife brings to nearly every situation, I simply saw her perspective as wrong.  I could not see past my own opinion, born of my experience, to value hers.  Understanding that she not only carries a different set of lenses, but that God ordained it that way to powerfully balance me and my determinations, has completely changed our marriage.  We agreed deeply on all the things that really mattered, but tended to focus on the small ways we didn’t.