Her Sides

  As our life seasons change, what God plans for us and expects us to get involved may change. We must keep listening to his direction and stay alert for his guidance for change, so we are not stuck in the past, hung up on what he asked us to do in a past season that's no longer relevant.   As God's dear children, we must be attentive to hear what he asks us to do now, in this season. That's why being open-minded, flexible, and staying in tune with his spirit is critical to getting direction for the today of our lives and not the yesterday.    I like to think of my life and plan for it in decades, blocks of ten years. It's easier to project for a short enough time to prepare and a long enough time to execute. When I pray, I ask God for wisdom, guidance, and direction for what to do and how to live the best life is calling me to live each decade.    What should I do in my 20s, 30s and 40s? As I look back on each decade, I see how my plans and pri...

  I smile when I listen to people talk about the good old days or a time in their life when everything was great and going precisely according to plan. You see the spark in their eyes as they retell happy tales of the great days when life was great. You watch their lips curl up in a satisfying smile as they talk about the abundance they enjoyed in either wealth, peace, power, or even human connection. You get drawn in rapt attention as their bodies get animated at the point the story gets to a crescendo as the adventure peaks. Then you watch their shoulders suddenly drop as they descend from the heights of joy when the story takes a new turn into today’s realities where things are not as great as they use to be.     When I listen to tales of the good old days, I often wonder, "what happened to you, and how did you lose it all?" Sometimes you get a glimpse of the tragedy in a moment of absolute openness when the storyteller forgets himself and sh...

  This is an interesting conversation for me. Every time I hear someone talk about purpose, I wonder, “Just how much influence can you have on how life turns out?” When you watch the movie Hercules, you see how a man defies prophecies and charts his own life’s course. When you watch the movie Troy, you see how another man, Achilles, goes against prophecies, but his life ends up just as it was prophesied. And when you read some self-help books, you see a lot of examples of people in our time who took charge of their life and made it what they wanted it to be. But then we’ve all met people who’ve worked tirelessly and still don’t have the life they desire. So what do we conclude? Does human life depend on some grand plan from God, or can man actually make his own destiny? "For the children being not yet born, neither having done any good or evil, in order that the purpose of God according to election might stand, not by works, but by Him that calleth), it was said unto...

When you have a project in mind to execute, the first thing you think about is a plan. With Information Technology tools, modern science has made the art of planning much more simplified these days. One of my best project planning tools is Microsoft Project. How does it work? Let’s say I want to publish a new book by the end of the year. The first thing I would want to do is to come up with a purpose; in this case, that would be to publish a new book. After coming up with the main objective, I would then begin to break that one singular purpose into tiny steps or activities that I need to carry out in order to achieve that purpose—steps like write three pages a day, research the selected topic for five hours a week, select a great editor, contact literary agents, submit my manuscript, etc. I can imagine my tiny steps would run into a lengthy list. With my long list in place, I would need to state when I intend to do what. In doing that, I would have to answer questions like...