A Labyrinthine Journey

One of the issues for me in the last few months and maybe even for years is that I have tended to follow the various winds around me without my own personal direction. There is a great value to being spontaneous and “infinitely flexible,” but there is also a great cost. I tend to be open to allowing other people determine who I am to be and how I am to act and function.

One underlying theme throughout my own spiritual journey lately has been the desire and endeavor to find my own voice. One of the purposes of this blog was to hopefully stimulate that exploration and that expression of my personal view on life. So there was a personal agenda functioning. Yet, one reason I am in ministry and another reason I started this blog was the idea that as I explore my voice and view that we all can grow in the sharing and in the dialogue.

Well, one thing I learned was that the blog itself was not going to help me define my vision and my voice. I needed to have that voice already and use this tool as a way to explore the voice I already see myself having. Make sense? The answer to my quest was not here, but still needed to be explored in my own inner space.

During the last couple months I have been trying to be more intentional about searching for that voice in order to have something to not bring to this space, but to my preaching space and maybe even to other writing spaces. I have pages and pages of snippets of ideas for writing short or long, but was still blocked. Last month, I ran across the following article that inspired me to take up the task.

Should You Write a Personal Mission Statement? - Dumb Little Man

Your personal mission statement should be a concise representation of what’s most important to you, what you desire to focus on, what you want to achieve, and, ultimately, who you want to become. In its purest form, it’s an approach to your life, one that allows you to identify a focus of energy, creativity, and vision in living a life in support of your inner-most beliefs and values.

That was what I was searching for. So I have been brainstorming and reflecting and praying and mind-mapping first my own personal set of values and beliefs. What are the items that color and energize everything I do that makes it appropriate to me. I ended up with quite the document, it was a mindmap with 6 main branches and each one leading to 2, 3, or more sub branches. The other day, I looked at what I had and decided that it was in good shape, so it was time to move onto the Personal Mission Statement.

Last night I sat down with my values and beliefs mindmap and a number of key pages from my personal journaling and reflection over the last months and years to fill my head with possibilies and then went to bed on it.

That was an important thing for me to do. Part of my belief system was that I am not the creator of my own agenda, but that my life flows most freely as I listen to God’s will and trust that will to be expressed in the faithfully personal way God has set up for me. The idea is that God created me the way I am (whether I see and understand that way or not is irrelevant) and so the best one to help me understand how to best be myself was God.

I went to bed last night not knowing when God was going to work or how or what was going to be given to me, but knowing that it was best for me to place it in God’s hands.

Little did I know.

Around 4:00 in the morning I woke up with a phrase in my head and the sense in my gut, and whole body actually that this was it. I laid there for about half an hour trying to play with the statement to see if it was good or better or worse than other variations on the theme. None of the variations had the same sort of spirit affirmation that the original phrase had.

To Behold the Abounding Presence of God

So for now I have a personal mission statement. I don’t  really fully understand the implications of it all, but as I sit with it, I find myself excited and energized with the possibilities this statement holds.

Over the next few days I want to reflect further on it and hopefully enter into a dialogue with the Spirit that will lead to a more free experience of life and love.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 9th, 2008 at 9:58 pm and is filed under spirituality. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.