Reformation Report

Character

The focus of this blog over the last several weeks has been, the importance of having a high level self esteem. This requires us to have a high level of self awareness, which means knowing who we are. If I asked you to describe yourself today, what sort of adjectives would you use? Would the words you use to describe yourself be positive or negative?

 

James Allen once said that ‘your character is the sum total of all your thoughts’. The Bible says, “as a man thinks in his heart, so is he.” (Proverbs 23:7) In other words our current character is a direct result of the thoughts we dwell on in our minds. Character is a result of continued effort in right thinking. Having a God like character means we have a God consciousness, or an awareness of God in our thoughts at all times.

 

Therefore, if we are dissatisfied our current character, which is a result of the thoughts that we have held in the past, and if we want to elevate ourselves to a more positive, forward-looking character, then we should be able to do so by changing our thought patterns. Of course this also means we will positively change our future, so we become the architects of our own destiny. This is an incredible power that has been afforded to us, and therefore shouldn’t be taken lightly. Our awareness of ourselves is even greater when we have an awareness of the One who created us.

Self Mastery

In my recent posts I have tried to focus on how as individuals we can develop our self image, self esteem and the vision for our lives. I strongly believe that as individuals we are the smallest indivisible part of a community, the basic unit, and the bricks with which great nations are built.

 

We can destroy our lives through cumulative moments of a lack of self mastery that we allow to develop into bad habits. If we cannot master the way we manage our wealth, relationships and health, or if we do not develop a culture of love and appreciation in ourselves or within our families and communities, we risk destroying the family fabric that holds a nation together.

 

As a nation, mastering the way we manage our wealth and resources, both natural and human, is essential, otherwise we will not achieve the goals nor the vision that we set for ourselves. As I study the most effective lives and societies in the world, I realize that whole communities also need to master forgiveness. To forgive those who have hurt us in the past is powerful, because it allows us to focus our energy, not on a past that we can neither change nor influence, but helps focus our energy on the development of our nation’s future.

 

We cannot change the future by focusing on the past. We can, however, chart our destiny by being positive, changing the thoughts we are thinking, the words we are speaking and the decisions we making. Let’s not wait for tomorrow, let’s start today!

What are you thinking about?

Constant awareness of our thoughts helps us moderate our words. There is a proverb that says, “as a man thinks, so he is”, or as another philosopher says, “our words are verbal expressions of our soul.”  We have come to understand that words are building blocks to the reality that we create. When God created the world, He released his creative power through the words He used. Each of us were first an idea in God’s mind, in Jeremiah 1:5 the prophet says, “Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you and I approved of you as my chosen instrument.” Then God spoke, “and it was so”.

 

Words believed and spoken form our actions, and actions repeated become habits. Habits by definition are learned acts, a pattern of activity that has, through repetition, become automatic, fixed, that are easily and effortlessly carried out.

 

Our habits reveal our character, which is the manifestation of our decisions and values.  It has been said, “We are the sum total of the people we relate to and the books we read.” If this is true then we must be aware of how these forces influence our internal core convictions, because they in turn determine decisions and choices we make. The choices we make result in us either embracing or refusing the opportunities that come to us. We choose the difficulties we are going to master.

By examining the thoughts that our mind gravitates towards, we will find out how powerful our mind is. If individuals, families, companies or even nations dwell on negative thoughts there will be a tendency to be pessimistic often leading to complaining and a victim mentality.

 

Positive thinkers on the other hand see opportunities in the midst of chaos, they always look for answers to life’s complicated questions, they are solution oriented, no problem is insurmountable. Which category do you, your family,      your business or nation fall under?

 

We need to ask ourselves, why are we thinking what we are thinking? Who or what is influencing our thought patterns? Does television, family, friends, culture, environment or even education play too much of a role in our thinking? What are the influences in our lives telling us to think about? Are our dominant thoughts positive or negative?

Harvest Fields beyond your gates

Government’s at times fall into what political scientists call ‘the founding father syndrome.’ In many African nations, decades after independence, often the founding fathers are still talking of fighting a revolution, and in fact are still fighting a battle that they won decades earlier. In the case of  Zimbabwe the country I have chosen to serve in it has been twenty-nine years. They had a vision to see their country liberated and they poured all their energy into their struggle. They locked on to it so much that they could not see anything else. They held on to it and refused to let go of their belief and vision, even when the enemy they were fighting had long since surrendered. If there was no enemy, they invented one to suit the purposes of their vision. That is at a national level, but it is also applicable at an individual level, where we can be so totally locked on to our jobs or our children, that we cannot see beyond that initial life ‘vision’ we held.

We may become like Elisha’s servant in 2 Kings 6 verse 15, who could only see the Syrian army that was encamped around them, and did not see God’s chariots of fire, until Elisha prayed to God to open his eyes. When we find that we as individuals or a nation are locked onto this narrow pattern of thought, we need to renew our minds or in the case of the nation, renew our collective mind. This process always starts one person at a time.  As we ask God to ‘open our eyes’ we will learn to think outside the box which is outside our current reality.  This enables us to catch and develop the multitude of possibilities flowing toward us at any given point in time. With new ideas comes new life. As we learn to paint new vivid pictures of the reality that we want, we replace the negative picture of the limiting past or those of the current reality we find ourselves in.

 

The circumstances we face can sometimes overwhelm us, conditioning us into a ‘silo mentality’ where we are blinded from seeing further than the walls surrounding us. When we find ourselves inundated by the demands of life, we need to open our eyes to see the harvest fields God has set for us beyond the gates of our house, our business, our city or our nation. Constant awareness of the opportunities that are before us require us to constantly be setting and resetting our vision. If the vision that we pursued has been attained we need to find a new vision. We need to go from glory to glory, and from strength to strength. If we keep doing the same things and expecting different results, we are deceived and we will keep fighting the same war over and over again.

 

What is your current vision? Does it energize you, is it bigger than you think is possible, are you visualizing and verbalizing it, declaring it as established, before it even is? If you are, then you will be powerfully positioned to see, seize and make use of every important opportunity and opening that lies within your vision.

Diamonds in your backyard

In Marange, a remote rural area in Zimbabwe exists a subsistence farming community, whose sole ambition was to reap a bumper crop, breed larger herds of cattle and goats and expand their poultry stock. This encompassed the extent of their average peasant farmer’s dreams and aspirations in life.

It took the shock entry of some diamond smugglers, to turn their world completely upside down. A mix of disbelief and astonishment hit them when word surfaced that diamond deposits had been discovered in their area.  Their maize fields took on a new significance in their eyes, as they realized the significant diamond deposits and other precious mineral wealth contained in them. Their cattle had grazed freely on top of inconceivable wealth. Incredibly, some even discovered the reason why their mud huts seemed to glitter in the sunlight at certain times of the day or with varying angles of sunlight, or even more spectacularly when these times coincided with rainfall – they had mixed the diamond deposits with the mud to build the walls of their huts!  They knew their soil was a source of their income, but totally underestimated the actual value.

 

Most of us, like the community of Marange, have blind spots in some areas of potential productivity in our lives. Often our awareness is restricted to our community and the things we have become familiar with, to what we are used to and are conditioned to. Our perception is our reality. The people of Marange’s perception of their soil was plain soil, not raw diamonds.

 

As individuals, families, communities and sometimes nations we can become blind to the opportunities that God has provided for us. It is important to question our culture, our habits, and our values because in many instances they build walls or ‘scotomas’, that  like the people in Marange, stop us from seeing opportunities that are right before our eyes.

 

What opportunities is your culture stopping you from embracing? What habits have you adopted as a family or a nation that are blinding you from seeing the diamonds that God has placed in your backyard? I want you to really think about this – what have you allowed yourself to get used to? Take time this week for some healthy self-examination of the blind spots that you might have.