Excellence

Wow! It has been a very long time since my last blog. I apologize to all my very loyal readers out there (none haha). I guess that is why it has been such a long time, I don't really have any readers to ask, "Why are you not blogging?" Hopefully, I can do a better job at staying on top of this.

Yesterday, I had the chance to go out to lunch with Kevin West. We got on the topic of striving towards excellence in our ministries. As I thought through our discussion, I began thinking about how closely striving for excellence in our ministries can relate to real life.

Often times, we come to the realization that we can't be perfect, so, we simply take a lax approach and form the mindset of "I will just give it my best shot." Is this good enough? In our lives, we might only get one chance in front of people to make an impact and portray ourselves in Christ's light. That one shot will either never get you respect again from someone or it will bring them back again. Do we want to just "give it our best shot" or do we want to truly strive for excellence every time? Yes, there are going to be failures. But if we are constantly trying to stay "on top of our game", more often than not, we are going to get people coming back to check out why our attitude, outlook on life, or personality is different than most people. They will come back wondering why we offered grace to that waitor or cashier. They will come back wondering why we chose to not yell at the referee when it was obviously a terrible call, or wondering why we failed at a task and embarrassed our ourselves but had thick enough skin to laugh at our failure. They will come back wondering why our attitude is so uplifting even when we've lost our jobs or our checking accounts have just run dry. If in every facet of our lives we are striving for excellence, we have an awesome opportunity to get a 2nd opportunity to impact someone and then a 3rd opportunity. Once we have showed them so many times that there is something different about us, they can begin accepting our failures every now and then. If we don't strive for excellence and we fail on that first impression, there will never be a second opportunity.

No matter what we do in our lives, Christ calls us to strive for excellence.
1 Timothy 4:12,15-16