It requires more than clarity of your personal vision, to realize that vision. You can have a clear idea of your ideal role, or your ideal future self, or the mission that God is calling you to, and it won’t be enough.
I am clear on what I want my life to be about. It is leading and communicating to connect people with the Word of God, encouraging them, seeing lives transforming, and people become free and fully alive.
Two things about that terrify me, leading people and writing. I am nervous that I could point people astray, or that I am the type of person people don’t want to follow. Writing scares me because, for a long time, I didn’t think I had something to say, but deeper, it is that no one cares what I have to say. So I talk myself out of it and don’t write.
Today I recognize that I am waiting for the world to change before I step in and do what I need to do. If I land this new big job, at a company I have been chasing for a year, I could go all-in living my mission. If I had enough coaching clients to quit my job, or had the financial resources to bridge the gap between leaving my job and going all-in on starting my business.
I am waiting for all the circumstances to change before I can live out my mission.
What can I be doing today to live out my mission, right here, right now?
As I wrote that just now, a friend’s name came to mind, Ronnie Slim. So I took a time out and gave him a call.
I met Ronnie in 2013 when I was volunteering and leadership development event in prison. Ronnie was serving a life sentence without parole since he was 17. After 27 years, he was freed after Bryan Stevenson, the lawyer the movie Just Mercy is based on, won a Supreme Court ruling.
Ronnie is now free, married, and just had a brand new baby boy three weeks ago. It was so good to hear his voice, so full of joy, telling me about his son. Ronnie was saying, “He’s perfect; I love him with all I’ve got.”
Among other things, I told him, “that little boy is so lucky to have a dad like you!”