Will Change from God.Dr,Sammy

Good or Bad-Takes Longer Than We Think
After three years of perestroika, the Soviet people still live with shortages of consumer goods. The grain harvest is still inadequate, the meat supply is still here-again, gone-again. The only real change is that front-page stories about the failure of the Gorbachev revolution now run not only in our press, but in theirs.
Those stories demonstrate a common confusion about how long it takes to change things. Ideas, prices, rules, and rhetoric can be altered overnight. They are information, not material, not bound by the physical laws of the planet. Concrete things like production lines or grain harvests may respond to new ideas, but the responses take a lot longer than most people expect.
During the energy crisis of 1973, President Nixon launched "Project Independence", a plan to eliminate U.S. oil imports by 1980. He and his energy analysts vastly underestimated how long it would take to discover new oil deposits and bring them into production, build pipelines, insulate buildings, replace oil-burning machines and furnaces with substitutes that burn something else.
The price rises and policies of the Nixon era never came close to freeing the nation from oil imports. They did launch explorations, capital replacements, and energy conservation measures that gradually reduced petroleum demand and increased supply. Oil price finally dropped in 1985, 12 years and three Presidents later. Then President Reagan and Congress, misreading the price decrease as a sign of sudden abundance, undid many of the policies that had helped to shift the economy away from oil. Given the slow workings of the world, their actions will set up another oil crisis sometime in the 1990s.
When the value of the dollar started down in 1984, conventional wisdom and optimistic Republicans led everyone to expect a rapid end to the enormous U.S. trade deficit. The dollar dropped for three years before the trade balance even stopped getting worse. That delay unnerved everyone, including the stock market, but it shouldn't have been surprising. A nation's trade balance depends upon purchasing decisions, credit applications, orders, export-import permits, production changes, shipments, customs clearances, bill-paying. The value of the dollar can change in a day, but not the flow of trade.
Scientists first warned in 1972 that chlorofluorocarbon pollution could destroy the ozone layer. In 1985 the ozone hole over the Antarctic was discovered, in 1987 a global agreement to cut CFC production in half was signed, by 1997 that reduction should be in place. CFCs take about 15 years to work their way from the earth's surface to the stratosphere, so a reduction in the rate of ozone depletion may start around 2012 -- 40 years after the first warning. Many environmental problems operate on these inter-generational time scales. They have to be anticipated; they can't be dealt with by waiting until all the proof is in.
There is one perverse blessing in the inherent slowness of physical change -- reforms don't take effect quickly, but stupidities don't send us to hell in a handbasket as fast as some pessimists predict. The U.S. budget deficit has not yet collapsed the real economy. The deterioration of our education system is only slowly impacting our labor force and economic productivity. If we do nothing to correct them, those problems will hit us hard, of course, one, two, or three Presidents from now. But we do have time to work on them.
Causes and effects operate on time-scales far longer than the elective terms of politicians or the attention span of media. If we don't realize that, we are doomed to expect too much, do too little too late, and give up too soon.
It took three generations to bring the Soviet Union to its present state. It will take at least a generation to revitalize it. It will take that long to restore our eduction system and make good the debts of the Reagan years. If we start tomorrow to reforest the earth and reduce fossil-fuel burning, we may be able to turn around the greenhouse effect sometime in the next century.
That's not an argument to give up. It's an argument to wise up, to be aware of the slowness of
change, to be careful with snap judgements about what is and is not working, and above all, to get moving.
unchanged is Change
TO BE OR NOT TO BE A VICTIM
Dr. Sammy D.James asks, "What makes some people hold onto being a victim and others choose to improve their lives?" The answer is control.
According to Dr. Sammy, when you are a perpetual victim, the past is in control of your present. When you are a conqueror, the present is controlled by your choices, in spite of the pain and pull of your past. Inspiring, isn’t it? Yet it is so difficult for some people to make up their minds and follow through, to become conquerors. Why? There are at least nine reasons, all having to do with an emotional attachment to certain kinds of crutches:

1) Identity
2) Rewards
3) Routine
4) Revenge
5) Dependency
6) Excuses
7) Avoid Challenges
8) Center of the Universe
9) Change is Scary/Hard
When someone has been seriously hurt in their childhood, the defense mechanisms and manipulative patterns, the warped perceptions, the out-of-control emotions, and the hopelessness that results in depression/anxiety are tough to completely shed. The truth is that there is always a battle between history and the present. It takes patience, courage, and perseverance to stay with the healthier and more positive program. It is a lifelong battle. Some people sadly hug the security of the familiar and rue change. Fear of change is a bad habit. But Dr. Sammy says, change you must, if you hope to have a life with meaning, pleasure, peace and joy.
I’M THE PROBLEM? According to Dr. Sammy, a bad childhood is easy to come by, and you don’t have any control over that. A good life after a bad childhood is not easy to create, but you do have control over that. In a bad childhood you struggle against forces external to yourself. To come to a good life, the struggle is against forces internal – they are yourself. Dr. Sammy offers ten qualities that make it possible to liberate yourself from victimhood, and change your life from victim to victor.
A look in the mirror means facing the truth and deciding not to be a victim any longer.
Enduring the pain means stop waiting for the pain of your past to go away – it never will. Eventually the pain will have so many wonderful interruptions that it will become more readily tolerated and a less powerful force in your life.
Acceptance doesn’t mean you embrace your bad experiences or that you like it or agree with it. It is now your turn to decide what you’re going to do with it – or in spite of it.
Letting go means not allowing your bad thoughts, memories, and feelings from your bad childhood to squeeze out any joy you could enjoy in a good life.
Replacing bad habits like negativity or always being suspicious of the motives of others. You cannot treat the world as though it was an instant replay of your childhood.
Reaching out means “filling up” the empty spots in your life with healthy, kind, encouraging, and supportive people. Although risky and sometimes scary, it is important and necessary.
Spirituality means opening outward. Living for something or someone outside of yourself is the primary means by which you find purpose and value in your life.
Perspective means getting the focus off yourself. Get involved in volunteer work, charitable causes, etc.
Hobbies are a good distraction to move your mind away from somber issues into a positive area for growth and change.
A positive Attitude always makes your circumstances look better.
Dr. Laura admits she could not of written this book earlier in her life because she too had to be well down the road of her own "good journey" before advising others. Yes, she too had a bad childhood.
According to Dr.Sammy, her father was "petty, insensitive, mean, thoughtless, demeaning, and downright unloving.” Once in college over spring break she actually stayed in her dorm room surviving on a bag of Oreo cookies rather than come home to his browbeatings. When her father died she did not mourn. There was no loving, emotional bond with either parent.
When her parents divorced, Dr. Sammy felt responsible for her mother. She helped support She financially (even though her mother had significant resources) and gave her a job as a receptionist in her counseling clinic. Her mother never remarried and constantly expressed disdain for men, sex, and love.
One day Dr. Sammy asked her mother to take a typing course to assist with some paperwork in the office. Her mother said "no", picked up her stuff from the office and refused to see or talk to her daughter ever again. Dr. Laura received word of her mother's death from the Beverly Hills police. Her mother was found dead lying on the floor of her condo. She had been dead for about four months.
Dr. Sammy says she was aware of the incredible impact her parents had on her life, as "I had difficulties being happy, building trusting friendships, being open, even relaxing. I didn't want to end up like either one of my parents, virtually alone and unloved." She chose instead to build her life on the principle of helping others.Is Change Good?
Organisms pass many different sorts of mutations on to their offspring as they reproduce. One might wonder if this is bad, since the Instructions they started out with were probably pretty good. After all, if they didn't have good Instructions, how did they manage to live long enough to reproduce?
It's easy to see that some mutations are definitely bad. Frameshifts and nonsense mutations are always bad, as they ruin an Instruction. Deletions seem bad for the same reason.
If deletions of an Instruction are bad, then surely duplications of one are good. While it's true that having more copies of an Instruction dramatically reduces the chance the a mutation will destroy that Instruction, the larger the Instruction Book, the more energy required to copy it, so there is some cost to having lots of copies. So, in the special case of deleting one of many copies of an Instruction, deletion is usually not bad.
But what of point mutations? Certainly, the ones that lead to Instructions that produce workers with broken active sites are bad. However, since the active sites are very small, most point mutations don't yield broken workers, but workers with slightly-to-somewhat-different specificity. To see how this matters, let's take a closer look at specificity and how mutations change it.
Mutations and Specificity
Even though workers' specificity lets them perform molecular origami on many different molecules, they aren't equally good at working on all of them. Usually, workers work best on one or two molecules or one or two classes of molecules with identical features. For example, Alcohol Dehydrogenase I can work on a great many alcohols, but it works fastest on ethyl alcohol.
As mutations change a worker's links, they may change a worker's specificity in three general ways. The worker's specificity may become broader, letting it work on more molecules, or narrower, reducing the number of molecules it can work on. Often -- although not always -- the narrower a worker's specificity, the better it is at doing its job; it's specialized. Mutational changes in specificity can also change which molecules a worker is best at changing. Whether these changes in specificity are good or bad depends on how well the worker can do the job it's being asked to do. If the worker is doing a job really well, and the change makes it worse at it, then the change is bad; if the worker is only able to do the job a little, and the change makes it better at it, then the change is good. Soon, we'll take a look at an example of why a worker might be bad at a job it has to do.
And what of new Instructions produced by swapping parts of existing Instructions (from eukaryotic Instruction shuffling)? These Instructions do something, but it's something different than what the previous Instructions did. Where point mutations produce changes that are slightly good or bad, exon shuffling produces big changes: the worker made by the new Instruction is likely to either be entirely useless (because it does something silly) or quite useful (because it does something that no other worker in the organism can do.)
Instruction duplication taken together with any form of mutation produces a beneficial result. Not only does the duplication prevent an Instruction from being destroyed by a particularly unfortunate mutation, it allows mutations to accumulate in one copy without harm to the organism. Since mutations generally change a worker's specificity, having an Instruction copied and then mutated gives rise to two Instructions that do slightly different things. This gives an organism the same advantage people have when they possess a set of screwdrivers rather than just one. This process of copying Instructions and mutating them is called duplication and divergence.
The process of duplication and divergence seems to have produced many of the Instructions living things have. For example, all animals contain a class of workers that digest proteins in their food. Since there are many different kinds of proteins, no single one of these workers works best on everything the animal wants to digest. These workers (called proteases) arose from duplication and divergence of a more primitive protease that could digest all proteins to some extent. The whole family of alcohol dehydrogenase workers also arose by duplication and divergence.
two members of the alcohol dehydrogenase family: Al and sigma
Since some kinds of mutations are good and some are bad, a living thing ends up with a mixed bag of Instructions in the Book it inherits from its parents. What makes an Instruction Book -- or more generally, any particular set of Instructions -- good or bad? Would living things be better off if there were no mutations? To answer these questions, we have to know what we mean by "good" and "bad". Most people would say that something -- anything, not just particular Instructions or Instruction Books -- is "good" for an organism if it helps that organism survive and reproduce. Anything that interferes with survival and reproduction is "bad".
To determine whether a mutation is good or bad for a living thing, one needs to look at living things with and without the mutation and see how well they do in their environment. Since by "good", we mean live and breed, the ones that have the "better" Instruction should increase in number over time. The process by which better living things out-compete worse ones and by which organisms themselves become better at living in their environment is called evolution.
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It is by repeatedly performing little steps that move us towards our goals that we experience success. Success that leads to satisfaction and the strengthening of our self image.
There are two points here that I would like to address. The first is little steps and the second is self image. Little steps are those consistent and repetitive actions that form habits.
I believe William Arthur Ward sums it up with the following quote - "Our words reveal our thoughts; our manners mirror our self-esteem; our actions reflect our character; our habits predict the future.
Our habits predict the future. Isn't that powerful? We can actually to some extent predict the future outcome of our lives. By forming new habits we can direct our lives in a positive or negative way. This is determined by all our habits. We all have good and bad habits. If we decide to replace bad habits with good ones we can change our lives for the better.
All change starts with decision and it is in the moment of decision that we define our future. Decision followed by action is the start to forming a new habit. I do believe that there is something that is more powerful than the forming of a new habit. It is something we often don't consider and it is something that most people are not aware of. What I am talking about is the self image.
The self image is so important in how we direct our lives, how we perceive our world and is core to the self talk that we have chattering away in the back of our minds. Whenever we accomplish something good in our lives our self image is strengthened. Whenever we compromise on something in our lives our self image is weakened. It is extremely important that we commit to strengthening our self image as a weak self image can have a negative impact on us.
It is so critical that we maintain a healthy self image even to the point of small decisions, like should I go to the gym?, or should I mow the lawn?, or should I call my mother? When we decide against doing something that we know we should do, it let's our self image know that we are not committed and next time that we face a similar scenario our self image talks to us and lets us know that we are not committed. On the other hand each time we follow through on a commitment we strengthen our self image and each time we face a similar scenario the decision is easy to make because of our strong self image.
To sum up today's article I would like to remind you that your habits good or bad will shape your future despite what you think. Your bad habits damage your self image, your good habits strengthen your self image. So resolve today to perform little steps to change your bad habits from bad to good and shape the direction of your future. Our habits predict our future.
To your future successThe old saying is this: Old habits are hard to break. The other saying is this: You can't teach old dogs new tricks. So, are bad habits able to be turned into good ones? Absolutely. There are so many bad habits out there, not one person possesses them all, yet, we do have them and we work hard to try and break the bad ones and turn them into something that is better for our well-being and for those around us.
Let's take the first bad habit that some of us have. Smoking. What a habit. Some say this habit is harder to break than if you were on narcotic drugs like cocaine. This is really harsh. The unfortunate thing, this writer is a smoker, and deep down inside, after years of being involved athletically, he really hates the habit. What is bad about this habit is that when you are around other's who smoke, it is hard to break the habit. What is even worse is when you are around people who do not smoke, it is hard to keep those people around. This writer's wife has come to the conclusion that it is hard for one to quit. What we have to do as smoker's is first do it for ourselves and then do it for the one's you love. First, use aides if needed. Then when the craving for cigarettes is gone, then you can start to exercise a little bit more, breathe easier and climb more steps. Knowing that you have quit and do not need a cigarette again, turns things into good habits like caring more for the environment as well as those around you.
When the bad habits become compounded because of certain things that go wrong in your life, this is something else that has to be worked out to turn the bad things into good. For instance, if you are a person who just had the bad luck of not being able to hold a job, which in some ways can be considered a bad habit, can be turned to a good habit by learning tricks of the trade. For instance, getting a good education and learning everything that you can and working for success can lead to good things for you and your family.
Knowledge of the bad things that happen in life can help you change the bad into the good. This is important. In a Christian life, sin can be considered bad. Reading the Bible and understanding it can lead to good things in your life. Prayer is so powerful that it turns bad into good quickly because you are not letting the devil take over your life. Do everything possible to do good not for just yourself, but for those around you. Help at charity events. Attend church or synagogue as regularly as you can. Grante.
Why good people fail to change bad things
it has been a year of great change in the Symbian world. Important change initiatives that were kicked off in previous years have gathered speed.
it has also seen change and trauma at many other levels, throughout the mobile industry and beyond. And the need for widespread change still remains. Daily - perhaps hourly - we encounter items that lead us to wonder: Why isn't someone getting this changed? Why isn't someone taking proper care of such-and-such a personal issue, family issue, social issue, organisational issue, political issue, educational issue, environmental issue, operating system issue, ecosystem management issue, usability issue, and so on?
I've attended quite a few "change facilitation workshops" and similar over the last 24 months. One thinker who has impressed me greatly, with his analysis of the causes of failure of change initiatives - even when good people are involved in these initiatives - is Harvard Business School Professor John Kotter. Kotter describes a series of eight steps which he recommends all significant change initiatives to follow:
Build a sense of urgency
Establish an effective guiding coalition
Create a clear, appealing vision
Communicate, communicate, communicate
Remove obstacles (“empower”)
Celebrate small wins
Follow through with wave after wave of change
Embed the change at the cultural level.
Lots of other writers and speakers have their own different ways of describing the processes of successful change initiatives, but I find Kotter's analysis to be the most insightful and inspiring.
The main book that covers this eight stage process is "Leading Change" - a book that must rank high in the list of the most valuable business books ever written.
Subsequently, Kotter used the mechanism of an easily-read "cartoon book", "Our Iceberg Is Melting: Changing and Succeeding Under Any Conditions", in order to provide a gentle but compelling introduction to his ideas. It's a fable about penguins. But it's a fable with real depth. (I noticed it and purchased a copy in the Inverness airport bookshop one day, and had finished reading it by the time my plane south landed at Gatwick. I was already resolved to find my copy of "Leading Change" and re-read it.)
As Kotter emphasises, the steps in the eight-stage change leadership process have mirror images which are the main eight reasons why change initiatives stumble:
Lack of a sufficient sense of urgency;
Lack of an effective guiding coalition for the change (an aligned team with the ability to make things happen);
Lack of a clear appealing vision of the outcome of the change (otherwise it may seem too vague, having too many unanswered questions);
Lack of communication for buy-in, keeping the change in people’s mind (otherwise people will be distracted back to other issues);
Lack of empowerment of the people who can implement the change (lack of skills, wrong organisational structure, wrong incentives, cumbersome bureaucracy);
Lack of celebration of small early wins (failure to establish momentum);
Lack of follow through (it may need wave after wave of change to stick);
Lack of embedding the change at the cultural level (otherwise the next round of management changes can unravel the progress made).
A few months ago, Kotter released yet another book on the subject of change initiatives that go wrong. Like "Our Iceberg Is Melting", this is another slim book - only having 128 pages, and with large typeface, making it another very quick read. But, again, the ideas have real merit. This book is called "A sense of urgency".
As the name implies, this book focuses more fully on the first stage of change initiatives. The biggest reason why significant change initiatives fail, in Kotter's considered view, is because of a lack of:
a real sense of urgency - a distinctive attitude and gut-level feeling that lead people to grab opportunities and avoid hazards, to make something important happen today, and constantly shed low-priority activities to move faster and smarter, now.
Instead, most organisations (and most people) become stuck in a combination of complacency and what Kotter describes as "false urgency":
Complacency is frequently fuelled by past successes and time-proven strengths - that may, however, prevent organisations from being fully aware of changes in circumstances, technologies, and markets;
False urgency involves more activity than productivity: "It is frenetic. It is more mindless running to protect themselves or attack others, than purposive focus on critical problems and opportunities. Run-run, meet-meet, talk-talk, defend-defend, and go home exhausted."
Kotter provides a helpful list of questions to help organisations realise if they are suffering from over-complacency and/or false urgency:
Are critical issues delegated to consultants or task forces with little involvement of key people?
Do people have trouble scheduling meetings on important initiatives ("Because, well, my agenda is so full")?
Is candour lacking in confronting the bureaucracy and politics that are slowing down important initiatives?
Do meetings on key issues end with no decisions about what must happen immediately (except the scheduling of another meeting)?
Are discussions very inwardly focused and not about markets, emerging technologies, competitors, and the like? ...
Do people run from meeting to meeting, exhausting themselves and rarely if ever focusing on the most critical hazards or opportunities? ...
Do people regularly blame others for any significant problems, instead of taking responsibility and changing? ...
The centrepiece of "A sense of urgency" is a set of four tactics to increase a true sense of urgency:
Bring the outside in. Reconnect internal reality with external opportunities and hazards. Bring in emotionally compelling data, people, video, sights, and sounds.
Behave with urgency every day. Never act content, anxious, or angry. Demonstrate your own sense of urgency always in meetings, one-on-one interactions, memos, and email, and do so as visibly as possible to as many people as possible.
Find opportunity in crises. Always be alert to see if crises can be a friend, not just a dreadful enemy, in order to destroy complaceny. But proceed with caution, and never be naive, since crises can be deadly.
Deal with the NoNos. Remove or neutralise all the relentless urgency-killers: people who are not skeptics but who are determined to keep a group complacent or, if needed, to create destructive urgency.
The rest of the book fleshes out these tactics with examples (taken from Kotter's extensive consulting and research experience) and additional checklists. To my mind, there's a great deal to learn from here.
Footnote: Kotter's emphasis on the topic of "real urgency" may seem to fly in opposition to one of the most celebrated messages of the literature on effectiveness, namely the principle that people should focus on matters that are important rather than matters that are merely urgent. In the renowned "first things first" language of Stephen Covey, people ought to prioritise "Quadrant two" (activities which are important but not urgent) over "Quadrant three" (activities with are urgent but not important).
To my mind, both Kotter and Covey are correct. We do need to start out by figuring what are the most important activities. And then we have to ensure that we keep giving sufficient attention to these activities. Kotter's insight is that organisations and people can address this latter task by means of the generation of a sufficient sense of urgency around these activities. In other words, we should drive certain key targets out of Quadrant two into Quadrant one. That way, we'll be more likely to succeed with our key change initiatives. You can stop divorce in its tracks, and improve your relationship.
Should you want to know how do I stop my divorce, you'll first have to convince your ex to give the relationship another try. This may be difficult, but it's absolutely necessary if you want to give yourself a fighting chance of stopping a divorce.
A divorce can be stopped at pretty much any stage - Ideally before it is even filed, But it can even be stopped right before the final paperwork is filed.
But the earlier you stop a divorce, the more likely it will not be restarted, at least not right away.
The way to learn how do I stop my divorce, is to encourage your partner to work with you to fix the relationship. If you have been begging him/her to give you another chance or whining for them to get back together with you, Stop it NOW!
This may seem odd, and you may think that without your nagging your ex will find it easier to divorce you. But nagging never does anything but convince them that divorce is a good idea. Who wants to be around someone acting like a child?
Those that act in an age appropriate way and behave in a pleasant manner, will surprise their ex and thereby help you in how do I stop my divorce. Explain to him/her that you want to stop divorce and calmly say you would like another chance.
Your partner has already heard you complain and carry on, so there's no need to do that any more. Just be clear that this divorce is not what you want. You may be pleasantly surprised how your partner reacts when you improve your attitude and behavior.
You may also be showing a mature side of yourself that your spouse hasn't seen for a while. You may also choose to suggest marital counseling for the two of you to stop your divorce. Counseling does work for some couples and your relationship might benefit from it.
Should your partner agree to counseling, then you have gained valuable time before they file for or attempt finalizing a divorce. Use this time to convince them repairing your relationship is the best way to go here.
Should the two of you choose counseling you'll have an opportunity to show your ex why they fell in love with you. You will remind him/her why the two of you got together in the first place. You can also demonstrate an honest effort in wanting to fix any problems that come up during your counseling sessions. This may help convince your partner to postpone a divorce indefinitely.
Please be aware; should you need help with how do I stop my divorce-that the person was about to divorce you. So it may be easy enough for them to change their mind and file for divorce in the future.
Always be aware of the state of your relationship, and keep the lines of communication open, but your goal is to have a great relationship for life.
DuPont patented the first commercial reverse osmosis membranes for treating brackish water in 1969 and improved Permasep® to the point that it was capable of desalinizing seawater in 1974. Permasep® is also widely used to produce highly purified water for industrial or medical use. For its innovation in developing the Permasep® B-9 permeator, the company was awarded Chemical Engineering’s Kirkpatrick Chemical Engineering Achievement Award in 1971. DuPont remains committed to advancing reverse osmosis technology and is the world leader in the production of technologies designed to make potable water available wherever it is needed.Sometimes I just like to look through the old files.
They tell the stories of hundreds of consultations I led from 1996 to 2000. During that time I led the W V M I, formerly known as Church Growth Visions, to help churches all across third world nations. When I found of LifeWay Christian Resources, I closed the company and christian company continued the work through Rainer Research.
The files I love to review are the stories of churches that made positive changes. Inevitably, each of these success stories has another great story within it. I then remember how leaders in these churches made changes in their own lives. Many of them didn’t believe at first that it was possible, and then God began to change them. He gave them strength they never knew they could have.
And they went from bad leaders to good leaders.
When Change Is Good
The bad leaders were not necessarily bad persons. But there was something about their leadership styles and efforts that was detrimental to the churches they led and served.
The good news is that a number of these leaders did make significant changes. They were willing to listen to input and seek God’s strength to move in a positive direction. As a consequence the churches they led became healthier as they made the changes.
Look at seven of these major transitions by the leaders. Every leader I studied in these files made at least one, and some made several, of the changes.
Seven Major Transitions
rom Arrogance to Humility. While some of the weaker leaders lacked confidence, others were simply self-centered. Sometimes our congregational surveys would reveal this perception. It was heartening to hear some of the leaders acknowledge their self-sufficiency, and move toward greater humility.
From Caution to Faith. On the other hand, some of the leaders were fearful of doing anything significant lest they offend someone or engender criticism. When they made the positive transition, they began to take steps of faith. The critics did not go away, but the vast majority of the church gladly followed.
From Inwardly-focused to Outwardly-focused. It was not uncommon to see some of the struggling leaders focus all of their attention on the needs of those in the church. While those needs should not be neglected, a church whose ministries are primarily focused inwardly is already dying. These leaders led their churches in the spirit of Acts 6:1-7, from self-centered to missional.
From Activity-driven to Goal-driven. The Apostle Paul said, “I pursue as my goal . . .” (Philippians 3:14, HCSB). His mission was one that was goal-centered toward Christ. Struggling leaders make the activities and the programs their goals. Those who became goal-driven looked at the reason behind the activities and focused in that direction.
From Credit-seeking to Credit-deflecting. It was absolutely amazing to watch these leaders move from persons who sought recognition and credit to persons who only desired that God be given the glory. They were also quick to praise and compliment others and to give others the credit.
From Prayerless to Prayerful. Leaders are often so busy that they take little time to pray. Those who became great leaders knew the Source of their strength, and they made time to pray. And it seems that the more prayerful the leaders became, the more prayer-filled their churches became.
From Somber to Joyful. One of the greatest rewards of observing these transitions was to see leaders move from a near joyless disposition to people who “rejoice(d) in the Lord always” (Philippians 4:4). Their joy was contagious, and they led churches to become congregations of joy.

Stories Recalled, Lessons Learned

I did enjoy reviewing the old files. It reminded me again of what a great work God has done in the lives of many leaders. It reminded me again of the positive changes that took place in the churches they served.
But, above all, the files reminded me that those lessons should apply to me every day. If I’m not the leader God wants me to be, then I must stop leading. Still, I remembered in these stories that when we mess up, the God of all love and forgiveness will give us yet another opportunity.

Thank God for changed leaders.

Thank God for changed churches.

Thank God for changed lives.

And thank God that He can still change me.