A Goal Will Get You There
Goal…an anticipated outcome that is intended or that guides your planned actions, a plan for actively doing something. No one consciously plans to fail. We don’t get married planning to get a divorce, we don’t go to College to flunkout, and we don’t go on a diet to only gain more weight.
So why then do we see people do just that every day? Because sometimes what we don’t do is make a plan and have a goal. Benjamin Franklin said, “If you fail to plan you are planning to fail.
But there are times we do make the plan and set our goals and those failures happen anyway! People have free will and can make choices that wreck our plan and sometimes even after we know what we want to do, we can fail to follow through with the steps necessary to see the plan succeed. We in essence drop the ball…
If you read the Gospels you will clearly see Jesus walking out His life based on His goal. His goal was the Cross, to die for us. But along the way He showed us the Father’s heart, He went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the enemy for God was with Him. Where He found hurting people He acted on their behalf bringing healing and comfort bathed in love.
I don’t believe He would have made it to the Cross if He had not kept the goal in His sight and bypassed anything that was in opposition to that goal. By losing His focus or deciding to do what He felt like He could have easily failed to make it to the Cross. All He had to do was think, “You know what, these people aren’t worth dying for and this is too hard.”
Our feelings are probably the biggest hindrance to reaching our goals. Anyone who has started a diet knows that it all sounds great till you get hungry, or until you smell a fresh warm chocolate chip cookie!! Dang!! Somewhere along the way it gets hard, and we get tired of the grind of it. It’s at that point we begin to entertain the idea of quitting. All of a sudden, the goal looks to lofty, and the price to attain it too high.
I’ve been married almost 40 years. Wowzers. We started out with the goal of making it work. But I can also tell you that a lot of those years were REALLY difficult, and quitting looked a heck of a lot easier, or murder! The grass isn’t greener on the other side with someone else, it only gets greener when you water it. The plan works when you WORK THE PLAN!
Reaching our goals isn’t always an easy endeavor but it is certainly worth it. Nothing worth doing is always easy, and the effort, while at the time, can seem overwhelming, in the end the results are priceless. Has God asked you to go on a mission’s trip, lose weight, apologize to someone, get out of debt or get physically fit? Only setting that goal will get you there.
If you feel like you’re spinning your wheels, getting caught up in the gravel and going nowhere, it’s time to look back at the reason you started going that direction in the first place. Examine where you are on the map of your goals and see where you took that wrong turn. It’s never too late to make a course correction and soon you’ll see the shoreline of your destination.