We had an awesome training event in our company yesterday. The team brought their goals (personal, professional, relational, financial & spiritual) and discussed them with one another. Then I fleshed out a couple of our key corporate goals. There was a great energy in the room; not a fizzy excitement, but more of a determined yet upbeat resolve and assurance that yes, what had been written would come to pass. You see in our company we know that the first step to achievement is writing it down, and our team has learned how that works. 2009 was an incredible year. Profits were up ten fold. Accomplishment was everywhere. I can hardly wait to see what 2010 will bring.

Will every goal be achieved exactly as it was written down? No. And that’s not the point. The purpose of the goal is progression—forward motion toward the desire. But any variety of things will then come to bear on that goal that might change it’s measurement, it’s time frame, or even its exactly purpose.

In pursuit of your goals there’s gonna be some hiccups. Call ’em failures if it makes you feel more comfortable. And I’m a big fan of failing early so you can get it out of the way and get on with pursuing that which is most important. That’s why I believe you should never exercise, read your Bible, or pray on January 2nd, and you should always eat chocolate cake on that day. Each of those things represent failures.

Hundreds of millions of people established diet and exercise goals for the new year. Tens of millions of people make spiritual resolutions. By this time…..writing on the 6th day of the year….many of those goals and resolutions are already weakened because we’ve already faltered or failed. Somewhere deep in our psyche is a warped, perfection-based notion that any failure to execute the goal activity or resolution blows up the whole goal. But that is nonsense. All it did is delay it by a day. Since such delays are inevitable—it’s not realistic to think that you’ll execute your eating or exercise, or devotional intention perfectly—-I advocate failing early. January 2, is a good day. Then, on January 3, get right back in pursuit of the thing that was so important that you wrote it down in the first place.

For years I was hampered by perfection. I didn’t know that was what it was, but that was it. I remember my spiritual mentors encouraging me to read the Bible and pray daily, and if I really wanted to do it right, I’d do it “a great while before day” because the Bible told of Jesus going out to pray “a great while before day.” (Notice it wasn’t just “before” it was “a GREAT while before”—apparently the effectiveness of prayer diminishes with each extra ray of light as the sun rises.)  If I wanted to be like Jesus, I needed to emulate Him in rising early to pray. But that didn’t work really well for a college student who stayed up until all hours of the night. I’d feel guilty that I wasn’t disciplined enough to get to bed early so I would have enough sleep that I could get up and pray “a great while before day.” Then one day I realized that God didn’t keep time. It’s always day in Heaven. There was no need to focus on the WHEN of my devotions, and that frees me to focus on the WHO—Jesus. I’m released from my perfection, which—in reality—I didn’t have to begin with or I wouldn’t have needed Jesus to come and die for me in the first place.

The mantra of my mentors Lee Brower  and Dan Sullivan is “Progress, not Perfection.” That’s a good way to think about it. You haven’t achieved your goal yet? So what? Are you closer to it now, than you were before? If the answer is “yes” let’s celebrate that progress and figure out how we can get more of it—moving ever closer to the goal.

I really don’t care what your failure, sin, or shortcoming was yesterday. What’s really important is your tomorrow. Make tomorrow’s achievements your total focus, and make sure the steps of today are pointed toward them.

An interesting conversation erupted during a recent celebration among friends. The topic was Calvinism—a particular branch of Christian thought taught by a devout Christ-follower named John Calvin who lived in the 1500’s. Calvin, like all of us, had some right ideas and some wrong ones. In a world run amok with fuzzy thinking about God, Calvin’s cut and dried theses have recently gained renewed interest among people who are serious about following Jesus. Even TIME magazine has weighed in with an article on The New Calvinism in a larger piece about the Ten Ideas That Are Changing The World.

The piece of Calvin’s teaching that seems to garner the most interest is an idea referred to as “election” or “predestination.” It is the notion that long before the foundation of the world God decided who would be eternally saved and who would be forever damned. Proponents of the theory cite God’s (arbitrary?) selection of Noah to build the ark and survive the flood, his (arbitrary?) selection of Abraham to survive the wrath that rained down on Sodom & Gomorrah, and Paul’s discussion of pre-destiny in Romans 9 which was set in the larger context of understanding the juxtapositions between Christianity & Judaism. What they miss is “the rest of the story” that isn’t there. We don’t know the larger context of God’s dealing with humans around Noah and Abraham. We only know of God’s interaction with them. So the notion that God’s selection of those men was arbitrary is an argument made from silence; a largely unconvincing approach to forensics. (An example of an unconvincing and I believe fallacious argument from silence would be the notion that since Jesus never preached against homosexual behavior it must not be a sin. It is wishful thinking that won’t hold water against the light of all scriptural evidence. But I digress.)

Calvinistic thinkers ask some good questions, many of which I don’t have the intellectual capability to answer. I’m an armchair theologian at best. Nevertheless, I have a problem—a very serious “I don’t want anything to do with that kind of God” problem—with the notion that God in His sovereign omnipotence made a list and put some people on the list for damnation, just because He could. It is inconceivable to me that a God who is presented in the Bible as loving toward His creation, and whom I have personally experienced as incredibly loving, kind, gracious, and gentle-handed, could behave with such capricious insensitivity. Yet my Calvinist leaning friends persist, in a non-arrogant  but matter-of-fact manner, that this is just the way it is: God picked some and He didn’t pick others and “Boy isn’t it lucky for us that we got picked. Thanks be to God for his gracious mercy—-to US.”

Hogwash!

This Calvinistic form of predestination is unsupported in the whole of the scripture which instead portrays a God who created people ostensibly because He wanted to be with them, who created them with the capacity to reject Him, and who actively pursues those who reject Him bidding them to return to Him, voluntarily subjugate their will (desire to “be” God themselves and exert their own form of weak-potency) to Him, and allow Him to again enjoy their fellowship as He watches over and cares for them. This is a picture of God that I believe to be Biblical and which is antithetical to the notion that “God’s got a “damn you” list.”

II Peter 3:9 says “….the Lord is patient not wishing for any to perish but all to come to repentance.” I Timothy 2:4 says that God “…desires all men to be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth.” The notion that God wants man to be saved and that He doesn’t wish for any to perish is incompatible with the idea that God created some people for damnation. It is illogical.

Omnipotence and God’s Image

My Calvinist friends argue that God is omnipotent—all powerful—and that as such it’s not possible for man to reject God because somehow that makes God less than all powerful. That’s a limited and monolithic view of an omnipotent God. The many-faceted representation of God in the Bible is of a God who—though He is all powerful—doesn’t force His will upon people. He allows them to choose and then experience the positive or negative consequences of their choice. In creating man with the ability to make such a choice God paid man a great tribute: He gave us god-likeness. That’s part of what it means to be created in God’s image.

God creating us in His image doesn’t stop at our endowment with the power to choose. It also speaks to the inherent way that men behave toward their offspring: instinctively we protect them. It is inherent in my father nature to protect my children, ferociously, like a father. Not unlike my Heavenly Father. This “inherent” nature, coupled with the ten major laws God handed down to Moses are the root of our human law that prohibits infanticide (except in the modern, “enlightened” world where killing your baby before it is born is acceptable ) and homicide. How could it be that this inherent nature draped upon us with the mantle of God’s image, and the commandment “thou shall not kill” could have come from a God who is Himself arbitrary in his damnation of some men while saving others? Where I’m from we’d say “That dog won’t hunt.”

God’s “Choosing” of Us

One of the points of Calvinist contention is in the idea communicated in Ephesians 1 where it says “God chose us in Him before the foundation of the world” and that he “predestined us to adoption as sons.” Calvinists view that to mean that God “made a list” and in a way I can concur. Where I differ from my Calvinst friends is in whose name is on that “list.” I believe every human was on God’s mind. He chose us all. But his choosing us doesn’t mean we chose Him. In college I repeatedly chose a lovely young woman named Bobbie to go out on a date with me. But she never would choose me. Instead she exercised her free will and said “no.” Repeatedly. I was powerless to change her mind because I’m not omnipotent. You see, “choosing” is a two-way street.

Man’s ability to choose or reject God doesn’t threaten God’s omnipotence. Rather it fortifies what I understand about the unique nature of His God-ness. The gods that men create tend to be all-powerful, and capriciously arrogant in the exercise of that power. They are gods like Calvinists describe. They have their way with men, with no respect for the nobility of the human they have created. They are unlike my God who chooses to yield His omnipotence to man’s will. This suppression of power is the notion that Jesus communicated in His famous Sermon on the Mount when he said “Blessed are the meek.” By definition “meekness” is “power with restraint.” God is unique when contrasted with the gods men create precisely because He restrains himself. He restrained Himself when He came in the man Jesus who Philippians 2 says though He was God “……didn’t consider equality with God a thing to be grasped and put on the very nature of a servant….found in appearance as a man.” God coming to earth in the form of a man named Jesus and constraining himself to the daily rigors of life as a man didn’t make him any less God. Instead it portrayed a picture of a God who would lower himself on our behalf—-a God who would put our interest above His own—because He loves us, wants us, chose us, and pursues us yearning that we would return to Him and abandon our petulant insistence on being our own God in favor of voluntary surrender to His supremacy.

Wow! That’s a god worthy of my devotion. That’s the God of the Bible.

The Main Thing

Much loved friends who’ve read this far, I understand your desire to make sense of it all. I don’t pretend to know all or even most of God. But I do know that Jesus is His exact representation. Jesus who told the story of looking for the one lost sheep and the one lost coin; Jesus who endured separation from the Father and cried as He was forsaken; Jesus who smothered and bled on a splinter-filled timber for me. The God who He exactly represents cannot be the nasty God you  portray who choses (prefers?) that those who bear His image be eternally damned.

In our effort to understand God better, and our study under the many who would teach us about Him, let’s let them decrease as He increases. Let’s not fail to emphasize the study, and emulation of  Him. Let’s have less of John Calvin, and more of Jesus Christ.

In San Francisco last week a nice fellow walked up to me and said “Thank you.” I shook his hand and asked why and he then told me that he’d read about me in a book called Get It written by my colleague John Hayes. In the book John had written about the fact that I have a signed, $1 million check taped to the mirror in my closet. It’s a reminder of my economic ability, my earning power, and of the value of my contribution.  Think about it, if you wouldn’t write yourself a $1 million check, why should anyone else?

Anyway, this nice guy named Kirk said “Yeah, I taped a $300,000 check in my mirror, and this year, I’m going to earn $150,000.” Hmmmm. I thanked him for mentioning it and told him I was glad he’d read the book and found the idea helpful. But then later I got to thinking: “He had a $300,000 check taped to his mirror, but I wonder what size the check was in his heart?”

I’ll bet it was $150,000.

Focus is a central key to success in any endeavor. Focus. Laser-like focus!

A few days ago I was sitting in Panera Bread (which we call “The Annex” because that’s where I have a lot of my meetings) with my associate Nola. The food at Panera is better than average. The atmosphere is outstanding! The baroque music stirs my creative juices! I can get alot done at Panera. On this occasion Ron Spigelman, Conductor of the Springfield Symphony Orchestra was sitting at a table nearby, and he was havin’ a concert. Laid out on the table in front of him was a thick musical score. He was swinging his arms and directing imaginary music in a big way. All the while, Panera’s own piped in music was playing in the room. He seemed oblivious to that, and to everything else in the room for that matter.

I watched him for a while, and then I couldn’t help it. I had to ask how he could work through this voluminous musical score while totally different music played overhead. He said “It’s easy. I’m a conductor. I am trained to hear many things at once, while listening to only one particular instrument. So, I never even notice the background music.”

Now that’s focus!

Shift gears for a moment and let’s take a look at an example of non-focus. You may remember a few weeks ago a group of medical academics issued a report that said women didn’t need to have mammograms as often as had been protocol in the past. Shortly after this report came out, HHS Secretary and former Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius appeared on all the morning news shows saying the report was wrong and that women of a certain age should still have mammograms on the previous schedule.

Now, understand this. I don’t know when women should have mammograms? (If they help with early cancer detection I want my wife to have one……DAILY!) I don’t know whether the physicians who issued the report saying less is more know what they are talking about or not (though I’ll give them latitude because they are physicians).

Here’s what I do know: Running the State of Kansas is an executive job filled by an elected politician. Being the Director of Health and Human Services is an executive job filled by an appointed politician. If Kathleen Sebelius were a wise woman she’d realize that this was an argument for the medical community, not a stage for political theatre. But I know, when you are just the HHS secretary and you really want to be the Senator (or whatever) from Kansas you’ve got to get your face on TV whenever you can. However, the point is: she was out of her area of expertise. She drifted from politics and administration into medicine. The HHS secretary needs to deal with public health policy, but she shouldn’t be advising people on when to schedule an exam. She’d lost her focus!

Those of us who have capacious curiosity and large egos can be given to mission creep—to drifting into areas where we really don’t have specialized knowledge to contribute, or helpful things to say. We need to know when to shut up. Beyond that, we need to take a good look at our lives and determine whether we are really investing our energy in the places where it makes the most impact. Are we focused?

I’m reminded of the power of focus in nature: The Grand Canyon was carved not by water that dispersed over acres, but by water that was concentrated into a stream focused on one path.

Sports provides an analogy. I’m writing this piece from Chicago, home of the greatest basketball player ever, Michael Jordan. Do you remember when the great Michael Jordan tried to play professional baseball? He failed! He lost his focus on doing what he did best, drifted into another arena, and failed.

Dispersion = failure. Focus = success.

I just departed from a convention of my colleagues who were asking questions about how to be successful. Many of the answers given were about things they could “add on” to their existing business to give them success. NO! Success comes when you “take away” the ancillary things that distract you from your primary mission and focus your efforts and energy on the one thing that matters most to your success. Don’t seek to do more. Do less, and do it really well.

Focus! Focus! Focus!