Welcome back!
Your ability to stick with a budget of both time and money, and cooperate with your family about the logistical choices you’ve made, is a major predictor of your success. One wonderful aspect of pursuing your destiny is that normally you won’t have anyone standing over you making you be accountable. It’s all on you. However, that can be a downside for people who need structure and direction to help them get things done. If this is your situation, think about enlisting the help of an accountability partner, coach, or mentor to regularly check in with regarding your progress. When you’re rafting you learn to play the current and let it do a lot of the work for you. That means you don’t paddle across it sideways, row backwards, or pull the raft over to the shoreline repeatedly. You strategically position yourself so the current carries you where you want to go. Unless you’re on an unusually calm or windy stretch, the paddling isn’t about moving the raft, it’s about guiding it.
In the same way, you want to build forward momentum with your destiny and ride it for all it’s worth. As your destiny develops a current of it’s own it will carry you steadily along, as long as you don’t paddle upstream against the realities of your finances, time, energy, or logistical obligations. The only way you’ll create favorable conditions is through the self-discipline of accepting conditions for what they are and not flailing pointlessly against them. There is only so much of you to go around. Invest your energy wisely. It is a very tall order to juggle career, family, and personal well-being while building your God given destiny. Huge kudos to you for reaching this point and going for it! Just like on the river, you’ll need to learn how to conserve energy when and how you can. One of the sweetest parts of rafting is jumping into the calm stretches of water, letting the gentle swimmer’s rapids carry you over the boulders which are submerged deep below. It brings a whole new meaning to lying on your back and watching the clouds go by, when you float with your feet downstream and let the current carry you along the natural course of the river. It’s a time of rest and play, which are vitally important to the success of the trip. After all, nobody would go rafting if it wasn’t fun.
Make sure you conserve your energy by taking time out from all the hard work and having some of those refreshing swimming-in-calm-waters times with your friends, family, and in your own personal way. Go to a ballgame, take the kids to the park, play with the dogs, surprise your spouse with a candlelight dinner, or whatever else will rejuvenate you and build the most important relationships in your life. Remember a huge reason you are doing this is because of them. If they are supporting you while you build your destiny, if your spouse is gracious enough to back you, and your kids and friends are cheering you on, then you owe it to them to be self-disciplined enough to build in break times with them. You want to look back and say you did right by people when you built your destiny. You want your support people to feel as good about the process you followed as they do about the finished product.
Until next time, I’ll be praying for you to block out some time in the calendar with friends and family, and then stick with those plans!
