If you feel called to something, it will create tension in your life.
Your calling will pull you away from who you are and even who you thought you wanted to become.
It will put you at odds with your previous goals and even some of your current relationships.
Not everyone will understand your new direction.
You may not even fully understand it yourself.
Your task is not to understand, but to listen.
Heed the call and lean into the tension.
Don’t let pride hinder your progress.
Whatever you are working to achieve will come with difficulty and unavoidable setbacks.
The more lofty your goals, the greater the challenges you will face along the way.
As you start to make progress, you will feel good, and motivation will be easy to come by.
But then comes the inevitable dip wherein progress slows, motivation wanes, and things get hard.
If you take this personally, if you perceive this as a sign of your personal inadequacy, you will quit.
If, however, you understand that growth is difficult and setbacks are part of the process, you will trust that it is in the dip that the real work is done and where the most progress is made.
If you make a decision about who you want to be, you only have to make it once.
Now it is time to take action.
Every day, when you wake up, you don’t have to think about who you are.
The decision has already been made.
You simply have to do the work to prove that you were serious.
Do this work day after day without exception or excuse.
You become who you decide that you are.
There is no way to do great work without taking risks.
But risks are, well, risky.
Things may not work out.
Failure is always an option.
In spite of this, the goal is not to avoid risks, but to take risks that you can live with.
Take risks you can recover from, that you can learn from, and that have an upside, even in loss.
In this way, the risks you take become the path of the great work you seek to do.
In order to prioritize what is important, you must learn how to say no to that which is unimportant.
Overcommitting yourself makes you less effective.
You cannot be of real use to others if you are stretched too thin.
If you are overextended, you cannot even take care of yourself properly.
You must decide what is important and dedicate yourself to that.
This means turning away from distractions.
More difficult, however, it also means turning down opportunities that do not align with your priorities.
Meditations on God 