Success is natural. The river of life leads us there. But there are dams on that river that prevent us from arriving at that point called success.  My life is about helping people identify those dams—we’ll call them blockages—which prevent the river of their life from delivering them into that great ocean downstream which we’ll call “Success.”

What are those blockages? They could be anything: How you grew up; Some little, silly something that a teacher said; Erroneous teachings from unknowledgeable leaders in your religion; The Great Depression’s influence on your parents or grandparents. Today, blockages are being created in the lives of young people who are growing up with a parent gone to war. Blockages can come from anywhere. And we’ve ALL got them.

I recall one man who, recently divorced, was asked why he ever married the girl in the first place. He said “I thought she was pretty. As a child my parents had always teased me about growing up to marry the “ugly” little girls in class; the dirty haired ones with snot bubbles hanging out their nose.  So when I got the chance to catch a beauty, I did.”

Turns out she was beautiful on the outside, but broken on the inside. The result was a divorce devastating in its emotional, personal and professional impact even a decade later.

Wow! That was a messy blockage, producing bad thinking, and leading to a personal  train wreck. How much better it would have been if that blockage could have been identified and removed earlier allowing the flow of the river to lead to a successful marriage.

We often feel guilty about our blockages, so much so that we may be reluctant to admit them, and therein lies the first lesson: There’s no shame in having a blockage. It’s not your fault. It’s not a weakness. It’s just an “is.” It’s a factor that affects your success. The first key to blowing up that dam on the River of Success is recognizing that it exists, admitting it, and moving beyond the false & improper guilt and shame to look for a solution. We want to dynamite that dam—blow it up—so the natural flow of the water carries you downstream to the Ocean of Success.

Exactly what is that blockage? Is it a circumstance? Or, is it a mental paradigm; a way of thinking that needs to be changed? It could be either, but more often than not its simply a way of thinking or a “false belief” that needs to be eliminated. Sometimes those false beliefs may be so deeply rooted that it’s hard to get to the tap root eliminate them. Our strongly-held, false beliefs may even be so comfortable we don’t want to let them go. There can be a sense of security, even in false belief!

Removing the dams on the River of Success requires willingness on your part to #1. Look into yourself and discover the blockage. #2. Delve into your thinking to ask yourself why you think that way. #3. Be willing to challenge your own belief to be sure it is correct or to change your thinking if it needs to be changed. When you remove those blockages, you’ll be amazed at how quickly the current of the River of Success will deliver you to higher and higher levels of achievement and personal satisfaction.

“There are four quarters in a game, and four quarters in a year. At the end of the year did you walk away having won, or did you just play the game?” Nola Peterson crystalized that thought yesterday at the end of a brief Year End Sprint training session in which I focused our top leadership on “running through the bag” so the year could be completed instead of  just lazily “trotting” the bases until the year was over. It’s an important thought. Are you winning, or just playing.

I think most people engage their work for the sport of it instead of playing to win. It’s a game to get up everyday, suit up, show up on the playing field, drink Columbian Gatorade with friendly teammates, step to the workstation to run a play, drink some more finely ground Columbian Gatorade, have half-time, then go back to the playing field and run a few more plays all the while waiting for the clock to run out. I call this “Playing between the 40’s.”

In football if your team manages to keep the game between the two forty yard lines, nobody wins. The ball moves a few feet one direction or another while players repeatedly grunt, sweat, and pile into a heap. Not much exciting happens, and no points are scored. They don’t give points away for “fine execution between the 40’s.” You are credited with points when you break across the 40 and drive into the opposing team’s end zone.  Trophies don’t go to teams that consistently “deep into the 42 yard line.” Trophies go to teams that break across the goal line and occupy the enemy’s territory.

Notice the use of the word “break.” If you are going to succeed you’ve got to have a break out, away from the rest of the pack. You’ve got to break away from old habits and break-up with negative people who are holding you back.

Why don’t more people experience breakouts? I think its because breaking out involves risk. If I stay huddled with my team between the 40’s, nobody is going to criticize me for showboating and my opponents aren’t going to come crashing into me, making me eat dirt because I broke out. There is camaraderie in the huddle and safety in the group. There is no thrill of victory. There are no awards for accomplishment. There is no forward momentum for greater achievement. But it’s safe. If you’ll just agree to not go beyond the 40, the other team will take it easy on you when they tackle you and make it look like you are really playing the game. If you won’t embarrass them and make them run “all the way” down to the endzone. They won’t face-plant you. But that’s no way to live, knowing neither the sweet taste of victory nor the satisfaction of giving your best amidst defeat.

If you are going to be successful, you’ve got to break out away from the group. You’ve got to take the risk that when you rise above the crowd somebody will take a shot at you. You’ve got to understand that people you thought were your friends will suddenly turn on you because your hard-work, effort, and success make them feel bad about their own life between the 40’s. But life and work are not hobbies played for mere entertainment, we’re here to win. When we win big we advance the ball for our family, our team, and all the people depending on us. And, we give ourselves the respect we deserve. We are worthy of being winners!

As we make the final turn in 2009 and head toward the starting gate for 2010 let’s evaluate our game. Let’s be willing to do the hard work so that in 2010 we can spend more time dancing in the end zone of life.

“Our inability to deal with unpleasantness in life all goes back to the invention of the flush toilet.” That was the thesis of a great book entitled The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade by Thomas Lynch, a Milford, MI funeral director. Lynch notes that in the old days when people died, their family took care of preparing the body at home, and that the unpleasantness of death was buffered by preparing the  loved one’s body for burial. Life included death. 

With the advent of the flush toilet, came a shift in the human psyche, Lynch posits. The flush toilet got rid of life’s unpleasantness with the push of a lever, and thus began the softening of our ability to deal with the many unpleasantries that are part and parcel to the human experience.

People laugh, or look at me weirdly when I tell that story. However, I think Lynch is on to something. I grew up around a funeral home; drawn their by a young lass with whom I was smitten. My first kiss came on the doorstep of a funeral home. Didn’t seem weird to me. She was very much alive! Through the years I occasionally helped to move a body or to deliver the daily dead to another town. I remember when the congressman I’d grown up hearing about as a hometown hero came home in a casket. We opened it and found that when they prepared bodies in Washington D.C. they posed them with their heads turned to face out of the casket. I remember watching as Gary (the funeral director and father of the lass) grabbed the congressman’s head and proceeded to turn his neck until he was facing the direction that dead people were supposed to face in our little town.

I grew up on the farm, and value the lessons I learned there greatly. Death, life, sex, hard-work, economics, it was all there on the farm. It created in me a “rootedness” and a sense of “balance” and understanding of the rhythms of life that I value greatly and am attempting to pass on to my kids through the same farm experiences. But my learning didn’t end on the farm, and it extended past the funeral home. I remember being a Medical Explorer at Cox Hospital when I was 16 years old. Suddenly I was thrust into the delivery room with wailing mommas seeing things I’d never seen before. I remember standing by the bedside of an elderly woman as she took her last breathe. All of these things mixed into the milieu that was my growing up and that have served me well as a pastor, an advisor and counselor, a teacher, a Dad and friend.

So, why do I bring this all up? Unpleasantness, that’s why. In soft America we’ll go far to avoid unpleasantness. We lie and don’t tell the truth to each other because it’s more comfortable to tell the lie than to risk the outburst that the truth might elicit. We tolerate underperformance from our peers and disobedience from our kids because we value faux peace over the clarity and accomplishment that truth and discipline would produce. We don’t fight for truth, because the fight is unpleasant. Case in point: I heard a guy from Minneapolis today on CNN talking about how wars can’t be won, so we shouldn’t fight them because the costs are so high. Hmmm. Let’s think about that a moment. If we used his logic we’d still pay allegiance to the King of England, Obama would likely be a slave instead of the President, and all of Europe would be under control of Hitler’s offspring. Detestable as it is, I think there’s a place and a time for the unpleasantness of war. And confrontation. And moral absolutes.

My house has seven flush toilets. I wouldn’t take for my indoor plumbing. I’m infinitely glad there’s no chamber pot under our bed. But I’m not afraid of unpleasantness. When I know it is lurking, I seek it out so that it can be resolved.

Embrace the unpleasantness. Make the best of it. Learn to deal with it. If you need help, take a look in the toilet. But don’t forget to flush.

It hit me like a ton of bricks: You oughta “Pray, and not faint.”

I’ve heard and read that verse hundreds of times. It never mattered until last night. I was laying in my bed stewing over a problem at work, one that I can’t fix. Try though I might, I can’t muster up the power to fix it. It frustrates me. I toss and turn. I speak negatively to myself “Now you’ve done it. You can’t fix this one. You’re gonna fail. You’ll go down in flames. Loser.”

Then out of nowwhere (really?) came the thought “Pray and not faint.”

In Luke 18 Jesus was teaching his followers about the importance of having substantial faith instead of giving up. Here I was having “give up” talk with myself.

“Pray, and don’t faint.”

When I face trouble, its usually business related, and there’s usually a dollar figure attached to it. When its those “write a check and cure the problem” type of troubles its easy. When its those “can’t write a check big enough to cure that problem” then its time for worry, fear, haunting, voices from the past, and the sinking feeling that I am swimming in an ocean of waves so turbulent I can’t keep my head above water.

More self talk here….”Barry, you are an idiot. The One who created the Universe with His spoken word knows and cares for you. He invites you to cast all your cares on Him. He implores you to seek His help and here you are trying to swim through this by yourself. You know boy, it’s kind of stupid to go it alone. Yeah, I know you are strong and tough, but why retain the stress. Why not just call on God to help you? Why look to your obviously limited ability to fix things instead of to His unlimited ability? Why faint?”

Pride, I guess. And habit. It’s a habit that “I” have got to “figure out what to do” and that “I” am the “solution.” It’s a bad habit.

So, I need to change. I need to PRAY FIRST. That’ll be good. I’m tired of cracking my head on the floor everytime I faint.

I’ve had a hard several days in a row,  just the generic difficulties that sometimes comprise life. In their midst I find myself grateful for two members of my team who sit with me and talk through things at length, repeatedly, from different perspectives, over and over again, until we’ve got it worked out. Thanks Nola and Jay. What wonderful friends you are. I love you!

And then, there is laughter. One of my friends from Texas sent me a somewhat sarcastic email today and it made me laugh. I noticed the laugh. And, I enjoyed it.  And then when I got home from work as I pulled through the gate I looked up the hill into pasture #5 and there staring at me…nothing but legs and ears was a new baby llama. And I laughed. And it felt good. If you’ve ever seen a new baby llama with a neck as long as its legs, and erect ears sticking straight up, wide-eyed with that “what’s that?” look, and a gait that indicates it doesn’t really know what to do with those long legs then you know why I laughed. It’s the goofiest, gangliest thing. It was fun to see, and it was fun to laugh.

Proverbs 17:32 says “A merry heart does good like medicine, but a broken spirit dries the bones.” It made all the difference for me today.

May you be blessed with laughter.