Honor You & Your Calling

Happy Friday Friends!

I hope and trust this post finds you all having a great day as a glorious new day begins to dawn in my Sweet Home Alabama! This blank canvas is sure to be a great one...I fully intend to paint a masterpiece! :)

This morning I just want to visit for a minute. Perhaps your perspective will be shifted or you will be reminded of how truly valuable, irreplaceable really, you are. So grab a cup of coffee and let's visit... :)

Christine Caine once said, "The word vocation is from the Latin vacatio, which means "calling." At its core, work is a calling, designed by God to fulfill a purpose that is outside of oneself, a purpose that brings glory to God and blesses others." Have you ever thought of your job that way, as a calling?

Where you and I are in our professional endeavors is not a mistake. The people we have the opportunity to interact with on a daily basis and to serve is not a mistake. It is a calling that has been placed on our lives for this season of life and we must simply decide whether we will answer the call.

I am reminded of Colossians 3:23 which says, "Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not human masters." What if we approached our vocations that way every day? Instead of punching a time clock, instead of just trying to get through the day, we worked and did everything as though we were working for the Lord? Do you think things would change then?

When I was in high school I met a professional football player named Rob Taylor. Rob was an offensive lineman who had played at Northwestern during a time when they did not win a game...his entire time there. He then went on and played for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers...not the 2020 version that is going to the Super Bowl, but the version that did not win a game. Can you imagine, all the work and sacrifice that goes into being a Division I and NFL football player and never winning a game? I once asked Rob, "How do you do it? How do you stay motivated to keep going?" He looked at me and simply stated, "I picture Jesus sitting in the front row and I play for Him." Powerful! I want to work that way!

I think one of the real issues we have is we are real caught up in titles, status, etc. We don't look through the lens of how we can serve others or focus on truly making a difference in the life of another. We are concerned with our status, where we want to be, where we want to go, etc. And in doing so we are missing out on countless opportunities to love, care for, and serve others. I don't care the vocation, title, or position; if you interact with another human being you are being given the opportunity to love, care for, and serve another. Please, Dear Friends, let's shift the perspective. Let's take the focus off ourselves and however we are blessed to serve others, let's do it fully to the very best of our abilities. I fully understand that where you are today may not be where you ultimately want to be however I can also testify to the fact that if we honor where we are today, we will eventually end up where we want to be. Let's be great stewards of whatever role we are asked to play today. Let's work as though we are working for the Lord and not human masters. And let's love, care for, and serve every person we come into contact with to the very best of our ability. Let's answer our calling today!

I also want to encourage each of us with words that A.D. Posey once spoke, "Every day, live in a way that honors who you are." Powerful, isn't it? Every one of our lives has great value, meaning, and purpose...honor it! You have priorities...honor them! You have values, morals, and ethics...honor them! You have hopes, goals, and dreams...honor them!

As I sit here and type this I can't help but think that the reason many of us are sad, depressed, angry, etc. is because we are simply failing to honor who we are. We all know the feeling when we do something that does not line up with our purpose, priorities, values, and/or goals...and it does not feel good! Let's let this be a guardrail to keep us on the path to honoring who we are. Let's not compromise ourselves in chasing societal standards or status. I am reminded of the lyric in the Toby Mac song, "I don't want to gain the whole world and lose my soul."

Please Friends, today and every day, let's live our lives in a way that honors who we really are.

Please don't hesitate to contact me if there is ever anything I can do for you or your family. I will always help you any way I can. You can reach me at kevin@whatwillyourinfluencebe.com.

Have a great day, a wonderful weekend, please stay well, and please cherish your precious families! :)

Kev

We Have A Choice

Happy Friday Friends!

I hope and trust this post finds you all having had a great Monday on this beautiful evening in my Sweet Home Alabama!

Well, this is a first. I have written Happy Friday's on Saturday and sometimes on Sunday...I don't think I have ever gotten to the following Monday! Between recovery from my knee replacement surgery, trying to get back in the flow of things...well, here we are! :) Just the same, the burden on my heart is strong and though it is a few days late, I need to share my heart.

I want to start off by sharing several quotes I shared on Facebook last week.

"Faithful servants never retire. You can retire from your career, but you will never retire from serving God." - Rick Warren O.k, this quote really doesn't have anything to do with the Happy Friday but I love the quote! :)

"People fail to get along because they fear each other; they fear each other because they don't know each other; they don't know each other because they have not communicated with each other." - Martin Luther King, Jr.

"To heal requires that we begin to see things from more than just our perspective. Profound empathy is required in a marriage, family, business and nation. Empathy never excuses poor behavior. It seeks to understand it and strives to redeem it." - John O'Leary

"Respect your fellow human being, treat them fairly, disagree with them honestly, enjoy their friendship, explore your thoughts about one another candidly, work together for a common goal and help one another achieve it. No destructive lies. No ridiculous fears. No debilitating anger." - Bill Bradley

"People are often unreasonable and self-centered - Forgive them anyway.

If you are kind people may accuse you of ulterior motives - Be kind anyway.

If you are successful, you will win some false friends and some true enemies - Succeed anyway.

If you are honest people may cheat you - Be honest anyway.

What you spend years building someone could destroy overnight - Build anyway.

If you find serenity and happiness, they may be jealous - Be happy anyway.

The good you do today, people will often forget tomorrow - Do good anyway.

Give the world the best you have and it may never be enough - Give your best anyway.

You see, in the final analysis it is between you and God - It was never between you and them anyway." - Mother Teresa

"When words are both true and kind, they can change the world." - Unknown

"A tree is known by its fruit; a man by his deeds. A good deed is never lost; he who sows courtesy reaps friendship, and he who plants kindness gathers love." - Saint Basil

"Don't wait for other people to be loving, giving, compassionate, grateful, forgiving, generous, or friendly...lead the way!" - Steve Maraboli

"Courage. Kindness. Friendship. Character. These are the qualities that define us as human beings, and propel us, on occasion, to greatness." - R. J. Palacio

"We are exceptionally good at seeing the faults in others and exceptionally adept at ignoring the faults in ourselves." - Robert Barron

"Make finding the good in others a priority." - Zig Ziglar

"Your observations and subsequent conclusions about others often reveals more about yourself than those whom you observe." - Unknown

"Search out, look for, and recognize the good in others." - Billy Cox

"We are told to let our light shine, and if it does, we won't need to tell anybody it does. Lighthouses don't fire cannons to call attention to the shining - they just shine." - Dwight L. Moody

"The reason why some people are so kind is because the world has been so unkind to them that they don't want other people to feel the way they did." - Vex King

"If I try to understand what it means to be a Christian, I look at the two instructions that were given in the Bible that are paramount, and those are to love God with all your heart and mind, and to love your neighbor as yourself. That's it." - Bruce Cockburn

"The only way we will love our neighbor as ourselves is by getting to know our neighbors, even in the midst of our differences. The only way to truly know someone is by being with them, by conversation." - Eric Overby

We have a choice! You (the one reading this right now!) and I...we have a choice. We choose to listen to people, or not. We choose to try to understand them, or not. We choose to be kind to them, or not. We have a choice!

I have made a commitment in my heart and mind, affirmed and strengthened by my Spirit; I will choose to listen to people, to genuinely seek to understand them, and regardless of how they act or what they say, to be kind to them. I absolutely refuse to contribute to a world that does not want to listen to the thoughts, feeling, and ideas of another! I absolutely refuse to contribute to a world that does not seek to understand an opposing thought or idea! I absolutely refuse to not be kind to anyone! I have a choice! And so do you!

I understand that my commitment might not change the entire world however it will change the world I live in! It will change the world of the people I have the privilege of doing life with, if only to a small degree because of me!

Early last week I was listening to Focus on the Family during my quiet time. The speaker was talking about kindness. She said two things that stuck with me; 1) Do you know how many times being nice to someone is mentioned in the Bible? Zero. Kindness is mentioned repeatedly. 2) She stated that genuine kindness is not being kind to the person that is kind to you...that is easy and anyone can do it. Genuine kindness is being kind to the unkind. Being kind to the person who won't listen to you. Being kind to the person who has no desire to understand you, your thoughts, or your feelings. These are the true litmus tests of kindness...this is the kindness that I seek to give. I am very aware that I am far to flawed to walk this out in my own strength and courage...I will daily ask God to help me be all that he has called and created me to be. And to be clear, He quite clearly called us to love our neighbors as ourselves....not just the one's we like, agree with, who think like we think, who do what we do, etc. No Friends, He has called us to love ALL of them.

We have a choice and each of us will choose. What Will Your Influence Be...?

Please don't hesitate to contact me if there is ever anything I can do for you or your family. I will always help you any way I can. You can reach me at kevin@whatwillyourinfluencebe.com.

Have a great evening, a wonderful week, please cherish your precious families, please be kind, and please stay well.

Kev 

Choose Greatness

Happy Friday Friends!

I hope and trust this post finds you all having a great day on this beautiful Saturday afternoon in my Sweet Home Alabama! :)

I want to start off this week with sharing a few excerpts with y'all from The Leadership Gap: What Gets Between You And Your Greatness by Lolly Daskal. It is a great book and I highly recommend it to all of you! :)

"Only when we discover the gaps in our leadership, and confront our shortcomings, can we become truly great leaders."

"Being real is the first step to being great.

As humans we will never be perfect, but we can be the best versions of ourselves."

"Your talents are a gift, but your character by contrast is about your choice and determination. Never settle for being an average person - you were made for greatness."

"Every single one of us has the chance and the choice to choose to stand in our greatness or not.

What will you do?"

It is that last quote - "Every single one of us has the chance and the choice to choose to stand in our greatness or not. What will you do?" - that slapped me upside the head like a well placed 2 x 4. If we can all choose to stand in our greatness, why in the heck wouldn't we?!?! :)

Let's unpack this a little bit. Maybe you are sitting there thinking, "I don't have greatness within me." I would gently push back, Friend, and simply say, perhaps you should redefine greatness. Greatness does not mean the best, the champion or the winner - though those things certainly may happen when you pursue your greatness. No, the greatness we speak of here is far greater than worldly standards or trophies. The greatness we speak of here is about fulfilling your potential, about becoming all you are capable of becoming, leaving no room for coulda, woulda, or shoulda. It is complete. It is the very best version of you. Yes Friend, that IS within you! :)

Or, perhaps, you are sitting there thinking, "But I have so many faults." Welcome to the club! We all do! This is really the whole point of the Leadership Gap. We all - I said all! - have these great attributes. We have these great qualities within us that enable and empower us to do great things. Like with anything, however, when we go too far within that quality, it becomes a liability. And what Lolly basically challenges us with is this; do you want to pursue your greatness bad enough that you are willing to look inside and find where your weaknesses are and then, do you have the courage to work on them? That's it...are you, and I, willing to learn and grow so we can become all we are capable of becoming, so we can walk into our greatness. The good is there. The bad is there. Greatness awaits. The choice is ours! :)

So, Friends, my challenge and encouragement to each and every one of us is that we will choose to pursue our greatness - the very best version of ourselves. Yes, it is going to take honesty, confidence in who we are and where we are going, and bravery to actually walk it out. And it is going to have to be a daily decision. The decisions and commitments we make today have to be made again tomorrow, and then the next day, and the next, and the... The decision will have to be made on days that we don't "feel" great or "feel" like pursuing our greatness. This is not a one and done type decision and it is a journey without final destination. Until the day we breathe our last breath, we will be learning, growing, and pursuing our greatness. It is not a journey for the weak of mind or the weak of spirit. It will be a hard fought battle that will lead to beautiful places, touch countless lives, and leave each one of us with a deep, abiding peace knowing that we have done everything we could do to become all that we were capable of becoming. What a blessed, beautiful journey! :)

Before wrapping this up, I want to share a few more quotes I came across as I studied pursuing our individual greatness this week.

"Successful and unsuccessful people do not vary greatly in their abilities. They vary in their desires to reach their potential." - John C. Maxwell

"You can be good, or you can be great. Why not strive for greatness?" - Roxie Fine

"God has planted greatness in you. Let today be the beginning of a great adventure as you step into the gifts he's given you." - Joyce Meyer

"Never underestimate the power of dreams and the influence of the human spirit. We are all the same in this notion: The potential for greatness lives within each one of us." - Wilma Rudolph

Please, choose to pursue your greatness! :)

Please don't hesitate to contact me if there is ever anything I can do for you or your family. I will always help you any way I can. You can reach me at kevin@whatwillyourinfluencebe.com.

Have a great day, a wonderful weekend, please cherish your precious families, and please stay well.

Kev

Perspective

Happy Friday, Friends!

Y'all are in for a great treat today! My oldest Tender Warrior, Payton, graciously agreed to write this weeks Happy Friday. I have no doubt you will love his message!

Payton - Thank you! I love you, I am proud of you, and I believe in you! Keep chasing your lions!

Kev

Good Afternoon and Happy Friday Friends!

I hope and trust this message finds you having a wonderful day and excited for what will surely be a great weekend, I know that I am.

If you could not tell by now, this week’s Happy Friday looks a little different than usual. That is because I, Payton Haslam (Kevin’s son), have been entrusted with delivering ya’ll a message, something that my dad has been trying to get me to do for years, and with that, I hope you enjoy! 😊

Have you ever been nervous, frightened, anxious, etc. about delivering a message or speaking to a large group of people? Yeah, me too. And honestly, I have never been more nervous to prepare anything else in my life than this. All week I was struggling to figure out what I wanted to write about, and luckily for me, as I was showering last night and shampooing my head, it hit me… so here it goes.

Whether you believe in New Year’s resolutions or not, I would like to offer you the opportunity to not develop a resolution or change your lifestyle, but to look inward and assess where you are at with yourself. When people make resolutions they often focus on things like working out, eating habits, financial discipline, etc., but many of us tend to not focus on what matters most, our overall spiritual and mental well-being. By no means am I intending to make this a religious discussion, for the Lord knows I probably need the most work here, but bear with me as I try to make my point.

As a society we have become victims of indulging ourselves with content we see through our phones and TV screens. Every time I look on Facebook, Twitter, or the news, all I see is hate, division, and a broken world. What do you see? Are the things you focus on bringing you positive, uplifting, and happy thoughts? A few years ago, I got the bible verse Proverbs 4:23 tattooed on my chest and it says, “Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it.” What are you and I allowing to enter into our hearts? Is it love and encouragement? If not, I say we work to eliminate things from our lives that are not uplifting us and helping us grow to become all that we have been called to become. We need to be intentional about what we choose to fill our minds and spirits with, as what we focus on tends to become our reality. Another bible verse that has stuck out to me as profound recently is Colossians 3:15, "And let the peace that comes from Christ rule in your hearts. For as members of one body you are called to live in peace. And always be thankful." Whether you are religious or not, I think these words reign true now more than ever. As a people, as a body, as a society, we are called to live in peace, and always be thankful. At this time, I do not feel as though we value living together in peace, in solidarity, loving one another as we are called to do. Instead, why don’t you and I choose to be different and shift our perspective on things and be the intentional source of positivity and encouragement that people need. Every day we are either being positive and adding value to other lives or we are taking away from others. What are you and I doing in this day? In this world full of negativity and hate, we should focus on being the ones who offer encouragement. Not only will this help others, but more so it will help us because I promise you, what you and I tend to focus on and pay attention to becomes our reality. And maybe this is just a conviction on my spirit, but I feel as though I was called to share this message and encourage others to join me in looking inwardly and shifting our perspective to one that is positive, uplifting, and encouraging to others.

One last thing I would like to share came from watching the college football awards show last night when Clemson running back, Darien Rencher, was awarded the 2020 Disney Spirit Award. As I watched the presentation and all he had done for his community, I was impressed. But when they interviewed him on TV and he expressed why he does what he does, I was absolutely awestruck. Here was this 20 something year old college football player who has wisdom far beyond his years and recognizes that he was placed on this earth for far much more than being a football player. He was quoted saying during his interview, “I feel like one of the highest human acts is to inspire people to do something good.” My dad and I were joking that he could very well become the next president of the United States. But when looking back at it, we thought that because he was simply willing to be positive and work to help others become their best versions. Imagine what you and I could accomplish if we too had this mentality and wanted people to do something good. Just as he has the vision to inspire others we too should have the perspective to intentionally choose to be positive and see this world for what it can be.

In life we all are given the opportunity to choose how we view ourselves and the world and that is what makes us all so unique and well, ourselves. This perspective on life often shapes our beliefs, who we choose to surround ourselves with, and what we find important and place value in. I know that we are all different and we all have different outlooks on life, but our many perspectives are what shape our country and determine the course of this world. I hope and pray that we will choose to stand for something, make a difference, and encourage others to join us in this quest to make our world a better place.

I hope you all have a great day, a wonderful weekend and that you enjoy your time with your families.

Payton

Choose To See The Message

Happy Friday, Friends!

I hope and trust this post finds you all having a great day on this glorious first day of 2021 in my Sweet Home Alabama! Additionally, I hope you all had a Merry Christmas and that you have been able to enjoy quality time with family and/or friends! :)

Earlier this week I came across the commencement address that Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, Jr. gave at his sons 9th grade graduation. The speech was given on June 3, 2017 at Cardigan Mountain School - a New Hampshire boarding school for boys. While the entire speech was very good - and can easily be found with a Google search - there was one part in particular that leapt out at me. I want to share this brief excerpt with all of you.

"...commencement speakers will typically also wish you good luck and extend good wishes to you. I will not do that, and I’ll tell you why. From time to time in the years to come, I hope you will be treated unfairly, so that you will come to know the value of justice. I hope that you will suffer betrayal because that will teach you the importance of loyalty. Sorry to say, but I hope you will be lonely from time to time so that you don’t take friends for granted. I wish you bad luck, again, from time to time so that you will be conscious of the role of chance in life and understand that your success is not completely deserved and that the failure of others is not completely deserved either. And when you lose, as you will from time to time, I hope every now and then, your opponent will gloat over your failure. It is a way for you to understand the importance of sportsmanship. I hope you’ll be ignored so you know the importance of listening to others, and I hope you will have just enough pain to learn compassion. Whether I wish these things or not, they’re going to happen. And whether you benefit from them or not will depend upon your ability to see the message in your misfortunes."

As we say goodbye to 2020 and embrace the 1st of 365 opportunities, 2021, the excerpt struck me as profound and really got me thinking. I absolutely love when Justice Roberts says, "Whether I wish these things or not, they’re going to happen. And whether you benefit from them or not will depend upon your ability to see the message in your misfortunes." I would respectfully recommend we say it this say: "Good and bad things are going to happen to all of us. Whether we benefit from them or not will depend upon our ability to see the message in our journey."

This is my hope for all of us, that we would seek the messages in both our fortunes and misfortunes. That we would have a heart to continue to learn and grow as we strive to become all we were created to become. That we would remember that this life is about neither perfection nor complacency but rather about constant transformation. That we would not become overwhelmed by our situations or circumstances, be they good or bad, but rather we would look at each new day, each new opportunity, as a chance to become a little bit better than we were the day before.

And another spin on Justice Roberts eloquent words, whether we choose to learn and grow each day, God willing the day will come and go. Each of us will then be left with what we chose to do with that day. Today, as I type this message, each one of us has 365 opportunities to get better or worse. I hope and pray each one of us will seize each opportunity.

Please don't hesitate to contact me if there is ever anything I can do for you or your precious family. I will always help you any way I can. You can reach me at kevin@whatwillyourinfluencebe.com.

Happy New Year, Friends! Have a great day, a wonderful weekend, please cherish your precious families and please stay well!

Kev