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Does your life have direction?

By Rev. Dr. DAVID L. CHANCEY
Contributing Writer

Dr. David L. Chancey is pastor of McDonough Road Baptist Church in Fayetteville. The church family meets at 352 McDonough Road and invites you to join them for Bible study at 9:45 a.m. and worship at 10:55 a.m. this Sunday.

There was a wreck in Peachtree City several Saturdays ago. A golf cart crashed into a car. Interestingly, it was steered by a blind man who drove two miles before wrecking into a parked automobile at the El Ranchero restaurant. The passenger in the golf cart could see, but he was too drunk to drive. So he gave directions to the blind driver. The other passenger in the golf cart was neither drunk nor blind, but couldn’t drive. It was the seeing eye dog. They were moving, but were fuzzy on where they were going.

Yogi Berra said it best: “if you don’t know where you’re going, you might wind up someplace else.”

It’s important to know where you’re going and to live with a sense of direction and purpose. Too many live as if they are on a cruise to nowhere. I understand people really purchase those. People get on a ship and when they leave the pier, they don’t head to some island resort. They go out to sea and simply circle for two or three days. They enjoy all the amenities provided by the ship, but they have no destination. They are in a holding pattern.

Pulitzer Prize winning author Katherine Ann Porter said, “I’m appalled at the aimlessness of most people’s lives. Fifty percent don’t spend any attention to where they are going; forty percent are undecided and will go in any direction. Only ten percent know what they want, and even all of them don’t go toward it.”

Do you have a sense of direction? Do you know what you want out of life? John Maxwell in his book, The Success Journey, writes that direction starts with a dream. We dream of where and what we want to be.

Then he says, we need to have a positive attitude and associate with positive people. According to Maxwell, “a dream without a positive attitude produces a daydreamer. A positive attitude without a dream produces a pleasant person who can’t progress. A dream together with a positive attitude produces a person with unlimited possibilities and potential” (49).

A dream contributes to a sense of purpose. People with direction have a sense of purpose about their life. They realize that life doesn’t center around them, and have a sense of the bigger picture.

A man paused to talk to three construction workers pouring concrete at a building site. “What are you doing?” he asked the first worker.

“I’m earning a paycheck.”

The second laborer responded, “What’s it look like I’m doing. I’m pouring concrete.”

He asked the third man, “what are you doing?”

This man said, “I’m building a shelter for the homeless.” Each man was working on the same project, but only one had a sense of purpose that gave him direction.

Also, to have direction, we need to set goals that provide motivation and give a road map to follow. Maxwell writes, “your dream determines your goals; Your goals map out your actions; your actions create results; and the results bring you success” (80).

J.C. Penney stated, “Give me a stock clerk with a goal and I will give you a man who will make history. Give me a man without a goal and I will give you a stock clerk.”

Finally, people with direction are committed. An old proverb says, “Between saying and doing, many a pair of shoes is worn out.” What separates the dreamer with direction from the daydreamer is committed action.