Life Design Essential #1: Uncover the Only You
We live in a world where every artificial thing is designed. Whether it is the car we ride in, the streets we drive on, the lights that illuminate the road, or the building that is our destination, some person or group of people had to decide on the layout, operation, and mechanisms of the journey described above.
Your life has a design, too.
Design doesn’t just work for cars and roads and streetlights and buildings, and all the hundreds of thousands of components that make those things up. You can use design thinking to discover the life God has uniquely created for you. It is a life that is meaningful, joyful, and fulfilling.
Several years ago, Auxano founder Will Mancini launched Life Younique, a training company that certifies church leaders to offer gospel-centered life design through their church. Will, along with co-founder Dave Rhodes, is passionate about helping people get life mission right – what exactly is the best way to know and name what God has created you to do?
THE QUICK SUMMARY – The Rhythm of Life by Matthew Kelly
In The Rhythm of Life Matthew Kelly exposes the lifestyle challenges and problems that face us in this age obsessed with noise, speed, and perpetual activity. Kelly’s message rings out with a truth that is challenging and unmistakably attractive Who you become is infinitely more important than what you do, or what you have. Are you ready to meet the best version of yourself?
The Rhythm of Life is a brilliant and clear-eyed rejection of the chaotic lifestyle that has captured the world, written with common sense, humor, and extraordinary insight. This book is destined to change lives.
A SIMPLE SOLUTION
What is the brief and bold big idea that best captures today what God made you to do?
Think of it as a golden compass pointing the way or a silver golden thread that weaves through every activity of your life. It’s the enduring rally cry of team-you; it’s the victory banner waving over everything you do.
Ideally, every priority, project, and penny is filtered through, guided by and championed through this concept. Imagine every person in your sphere of influence being blessed better, served stronger, and loved longer because you form a unique life mission every day.
Translate a wide variety of life-awareness and self-awareness into a meaningful, practical, and simple understanding of what God has made only you to do.
Who you become is infinitely more important than what you do or what you have. The meaning and purpose of life is for you to become the best version of yourself.
In the diagram below, Point A represents you right now – here and today – with all your strengths and weaknesses, faults, failings, flaws, defects, talents, abilities, and potential.
Point B represents you as the person you were created to be – perfectly. If you close your eyes for a few moments and imagine the better person you know you can be in any areas of your life, and then multiply that vision to include the better person you know you can be in every area of your life, that is the person you have become when you reach point B – the best version of yourself.
At every point along the path closer to point B, we more fully recognize, appreciate, and use our talents and abilities and are more dedicated to our development – physically, emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually.
At each point along the path toward point B, there is a more harmonious relationship among our needs, desires, and talents. Through this process of transformation, we begin to reach our once hidden potential. At point B, through the dual process of self-discovery and discovery of God, we have overcome our fears and transformed our faults and failings into virtues.
Matthew Kelly, The Rhythm of Life
A NEXT STEP
Duplicate the drawing above on a chart tablet. Add the four words “Physically, Emotionally, Intellectually, and Spiritually” above the line between Point A and Point B.
Below the line, and under each of the words, write in actions that will help you move towards Point B. These are the best things you can do for your spouse, your children, your friends, your colleagues, your employees, your employer, your church, your nation, the human family, and yourself.
The best thing you can do is to become the-best-version-of-yourself, because it is doing with a purpose.
Excerpt taken from SUMS Remix 101-1, released September 2018.
This is part of a weekly series posting excerpts from one of the most innovative content sources in the church world: SUMS Remix book excerpts for church leaders.
Each issue SUMS Remix takes a practical problem in the church and looks at it with three solutions; each solution is taken from a different book. Additionally, a practical action step is included with each solution.
As a church leader you get to scan relevant books based on practical tools and solutions to real ministry problems, not just by the cover of the book. Each post will have the edition number which shows the year and what number it is in the overall sequence. (SUMS Remix provides 26 issues per year, delivered every other week to your inbox).
>> Subscribe to SUMS Remix <<
Tags: LifeDeisgn, LifeYounique, Matthew Kelly, SUMS Remix, The Rhythm of Life, younique
