These are personal notes that I've jotted down while reading this book. If you like what you're reading here, I highly recommend purchasing the book. It is one that I will keep around for the rest of my life because there are lessons in it that I value to a point of revisiting them throughout my life.
Some of it is directly copied from the book, and some of it I changed a bit as a personal thought or revelation.
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Average protects us from the risk of failure, and it also separates us from futures of greatness.
It is also, I am convinced, a window into how God works in the world and how we either open ourselves to his bigger future or ensure that we make the future smaller than he intends for us.
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... the one thing I have learned from her is that if you live in the past you died to your future.
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So let me be clear: Elisha took the plows and the oxen and built an altar. He set everything on fire that was no longer his to keep. He did this not to create a future of his own but to enable him to receive the future that God was creating for him. (He literally burned the bridge to his past so he couldn't go back, even if he someday wanted to.)
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I cannot ensure how long I live, but I can determine that I will love fully while I'm alive.
What is your proof of lie? What are you doing right now that proves to the world, or at least to those in your world, that you are fully alive?
Why is it that we would rather exist for as long as we can rather than to live fully for a short tome?
existence- do you exist? how do you know you exist? what proof do you have of your existence? when your body is gone from the earth, is there anything that will show the fact that you lived on it?
Life is action.
When you choose to live, you become a source of light... in face, that most heroic lives are lived by those who never think of themselves but only of those for whom they have given their lives.
Every action has a reaction; every choice ushers in a future.. Most of us know it's spiritual to pray, but somehow we miss the fact that it's just as spiritual to act.
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Your decisions are the direct result of truly knowing yourself.
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When you choose the right people, when you find your people, your life begins to come together in a way that it never could when you walk alone.
What you do, you need to find your tribe... finding your tribe is not about being of the same color or same ethnicity or same history it's about being of one heart and mind.
In fact, this is a principle that will hold true for all of us at any time in our lives: we are more powerful when you walk together, and we are more vulnerable when we walk alone.
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So often you blame God for the life you have, but you do not know what life you want. Certainly there is a dilemma here. The life you want may not be the life God wants for you. This is why the process must begin by loving God first. It is in loving God with all your heart and mind and soul that he begins to shape your passions. When God has your heart, you can trust your desires. His will is not a map; it is a match. He shows you the way by setting you on fire. You will know God's desire for you by the first in you! The first in you will light the way.
I wonder how many times God has asked us, "What do you want me to do for you?" and in false humility we stammered and said, "Whatever you want to do, Lord, is fine." The psalmist David tells us that we are to delight ourselves in the Lord and he will give us the desires of our heart. This means we need to know our hearts, we knows to know our desires, and we must allow those desires to first be informed and then formed by our love and worship of God.
(This is something I personally have to constantly work on. I'm not good at knowing what I want. I don't carry a lot of value in wanting things. But I understand from this that He wants us to live happy lives and He wants to bless us through the things that make us happy. So we need to know what makes us happy and what drives us to want to be better people, not necessarily outside the spectrum of faith, but what we want out of life itself.)
When you go to God, go big, dream big, pray big, ask big, live big. you will never live so big that you are too big for God. If you don't know what you want, you will get what you do not want. If you don't know who you want to become, you will become someone you never wanted to be. If you don't know what life you want to live, you're going to live the life someone else wants you to live. If you know what you want God to do in your life, you will wonder why he gave you so little, while the whole time he was waiting for you to see how much he wanted to entrust you with.
Our needs are God's opportunity to reveal his generosity and goodness towards us.
(What do I want?
I want to write.
I want people to read the words that I write.
I want my words to make a difference.
I want my words to be a vessel for God's truth.
Also, i'm using my Amazon list to think a little bit of physical things I want in life. It's helping me to know myself better as well.)
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Striking the last arrow is not only about seizing every opportunity; it is also about bring the right person at the right moment. -- Those moments and actions are informed and filed by who we are. The best way to ensure that you will seize every opportunity is to be the best expression of who you are.
Will you settle for less than what God has intended for you, or will you just keep striking the arrow until there is nothing left of you to I've, until you have given everything you have and everything you are and you know what, when it is all said and done, you're died with your quiver empty?
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