An Eventful Year

This past year or so has been more eventful than usual for me. Sure, events in other years have had my attention for a few days, or perhaps a few weeks. But generally, life on the surface is fairly steady. Most of the big multi-month things in the past 15 years have been work projects. Especially in the consulting world, life is organized around projects.

After some major transitions, I have made some efforts towards whatever is next for me. The future is not crystal clear (at least in my view). But it has been a good year of discovery and experimentation. There are things in the works and some projects and potential projects in progress.

In the summer of 2010, I moved to the south metro to be closer to church and work. That has been beneficial in most regards. So, related to the move, much that summer included sorting through boxes of stuff that may not fit in my new home. There has been some success in getting rid of stuff. But more work remains.

Late in the fall of 2010, I had fun experimenting with music mixing. Even though my music knowledge and skills are very limited, it was still fun to play and experiment creating unique sounds. In whatever media, the need to occasionally create is strong for many of us.

January through April of 2011 was mostly concentrating on Perspectives. Perspectives on the World Christian Movement (www.perspectives.org), is a highly regarded course to learn about what God is doing around the world and how we can join in. I took the class in the early days in 1985. It was time for a refresher. Well, actually it was very much overdue. But it had been postponed due to money constraints and time commitment. This was the year to finally do it. Although the course can be taken as an audit, most people take it for certificate or college credit. Each level has corresponding homework assignments.

Much of the material was review for me as I occasionally read mission-related material. But there were new things to learn. And, over time we have learned new perspectives and techniques in various situations around the world. It was a good course. But it did involve lots and lots of reading. I’m not a speed reader. And, at the time, I needed new glasses badly. So this venture occupied many hours for me each week. But it was worth it.

In the end, many of my previous thoughts regarding my role in missions were confirmed. But there were no specific steps of direction.

Pretty much as soon as the last homework for Perspectives was complete, I switched to preparation for the June event I will explain soon.

Concurrent with Perspectives, I took a short class in discovering our life purpose. I was with a fun group of people from church. Part of figuring out what you should do is to first discover who you are. There are various tests and exercises to help us see our strengths and personalities that make us unique.

Most of those tests confirmed things I already knew about myself. But there were new insights too. When we are doing what we do best, and those things that match how we are “wired”, then we do our best work and are able to contribute the most to the benefit of the world. And, and this is important, when we do those things that match who we truly are, we will enjoy it. Conversely, if we find ourselves doing numerous tasks that do not match our strengths, it is often frustrating.

Examples of differences among us are: relationship focus, task focus, teaching, fixing, creating, analyzing, organizing, helping, caring, communicating, structured, unstructured, etc. Most of these categories can relate to a wide variety of careers and service opportunities.

Ideally, we spend at least 80% of our time on the top things that match well who we are and our passion(s). That is how we contribute the most value, with pleasure. It wasn’t a huge surprise for me to learn that I rarely get to use my top skills in my current job role. So that is certainly something to consider for future plans.

So I learned some things during that class. But still, in many ways direction is still vaguer that I would sometimes like. But then again, it is nice to have a variety of good options. Freedom is good.

Sometime around early May, I was asked about a party for my 50^th birthday. Unexpectedly, I was confronted with the question “What would you like to do?” I hadn’t thought about it much. But after a short while, the imagination took off envisioning a unique event that could include some fun activities for all ages. And in some ways, I would be sharing part of who I am and some of the fun things I do that might be new experiences for most of the family.

Most of May and June had me doing all kinds of creating, organizing, preparing, researching, and discovering for the party. Some parts of that turned out fairly well.

Immediately after the birthday party at the end of June, it was time to switch concentration to the next big thing for me. That was my first vacation in years. And this would be the first vacation over ten days in my life. As I will explain later, this particular trip leads to many hours of research and a variety of purchases and preparation. Pretty much every day in July and August included some trip preparation activities.

These big events are where I invested much of my time and resources in the past year or so. With a variety of inputs, insights, and experiences, it is now time to see how the trip might guide me closer to the paths to the next destinations for me.