I spent the summer in Puerto Rico – which by itself would be a pretty cool summer report (if I was still in school), but the real story of what I did this summer goes much farther than a Caribbean vacation. I mean, not that it WAS a vacation, with the crystal blue water and smooth sand beaches just a few minutes away from where I slept every night, and the palm trees and jungle-covered mountains and cool caves to explore and…
It wasn’t a vacation.
Sure, we had some fun, but that was hardly the goal. I remember those days off perhaps more clearly than the rest of the summer because there were so few of them. Most of my time was spent working. I won’t kid you with this one: it was HARD. I’m not just talking about the physical work, either – although I was working pretty hard. No, the hardest part about my summer was the fight. I had to fight, and fight hard, for the mission. I had to fight for the people I was asked to lead. I had to fight for God to be glorified in everything we did, and I realized: fighting is hard.
I knew that, observationally, from the fighters I lived with on V Squad. Men and women who were called, for that season, to fight battles in the spiritual realm. I could see the strain it placed on them when they didn’t have any support – and how much effort it required even when they did. I hadn’t experienced that yet first-hand, until this summer. I discovered I didn’t know anything.
I spent a lot of time my first few weeks before God, upset or scared. I didn’t know what I was doing, and I had no idea how to do what was asked of me. I think the most common question I asked was, “How?”
How do I do this? There were so many things I needed to do. I needed to fight for my team, I needed to lead them, I needed to be in a thousand places at once, I needed to have a hundred things as my top priority, and I needed to do it all with no sleep, no real training, and no advance notice. Something would come up, and I’d muddle through it, and there would be a result that I wasn’t always super happy with, and I’d scream and yell at God, “HOW? How do I do this? How do I lead, how do I fight, how do I live out love, how do I pursue what you have for me here?”
And the answer came back, “Quit asking how.“
It took me a while to get this one. God’s not a God of silly rituals or rote actions. His goal is your heart. What you do really isn’t as important to Him as where your heart is. The funny way this turns out is, if your heart is seeking God, your actions are naturally going to be pleasing to Him, life-giving and positive. If your heart isn’t in the right place, no amount of perfect ‘by the book’ actions will please Him, no matter how commendable they are. So when I was muddling about in Puerto Rico, trying to figure out how to be this Godly leader that I really didn’t feel prepared for, and trying to do it from a magical set of actions that would transform me overnight into The Coolest Person Ever – I was looking at it all wrong.
“Quit asking how, and just BE.
BE a man of your word.
BE a man who loves deeply.
BE a man who persists.
BE a man who is above reproach.
Claim your identity as I have spoken it over you, and let your actions flow out of who you are. A leader leads because it’s in his nature. A man of God lives a natural progression of Godly actions because his character is so high those are the only actions he wants to take. BE a man of God.
BE the man I say you are.“
Whoah.
Paradigm shift.
I don’t have to have a thousand thoughts on how to do this or how to do that running through my head constantly. I just have to focus on loving my God and pursuing Him, and the results of a heart in tune with Poppa will naturally flow into all those little corners of my life I was so concerned about. Actions flow from the overflow of my heart – heart in the right place, life in the right place. It’s not really that hard – just BE.
