Wow. Branching out, what a hard topic for me. The past couple months I have been really struggling with being “clickish” on my squad. When I first received this feedback it really hit me hard and hurt. My whole life I have been told to never be exclusive with my friends and invite everyone into it. So for a while I was confused how you have these close friends without being called “clickish” or “exclusive”.
I am overwhelmed with gratefulness with the friends that I have now and they all truly make my life ten times better. To be honest I have not mastered this idea of branching out even a little but I though I could share about the journey.
With getting this feedback a lot then nothing changing I got the feedback even more. Many people were hurt or mad at me and it seemed like everything was falling apart but I would ignore it and have fun with my friends.
Over the past week God has showed me so much more in this and in this struggle I have. We had a squad talk on apathy and false harmony. One thing that was said was, “desire without action is laziness”, this wreaked me. This was exactly what I was doing. I was just plain lazy. I had the desire to change and to make people feel loved and not the opposite. But it was just “too hard” for me that I continued to not do what I knew was good. Paul also says this in Romans, “For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing.” Just because I have the desire doesn’t mean that everything will just easily happen and fall into place. I have to have discipline to actually be moved to action.
Setting goals is the best way to do this for me. I struggle sometimes with setting truly defined goals. So they are kind of hard to reach and measure. With SMART goals it is a lot easier to see the growth and reach the goal. SMART: specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time bound. To make desire reality you have to make real hard disciplines. My goal is to not be reliant on the people around me but the Lord only. The way that I can obtain this goal is to purposely pull away from people and go spend time with Jesus. I haven’t done this quite yet but this will really help because it will also teach me about fear of missing out.
I really need to do these things because the other night Jesus showed me that I wasn’t surrendering the people around me because I wasn’t trusting Him enough to fill that spot for me. I rely on people to fill me up and not Jesus.
I am excited for this new plan of discipline and putting into use of the SMART Here There Path. Thankful for the hard things because they teach me the most about Jesus and myself.
