Taking responsibility

Stephen Covey (7 Habits of Highly Effective People) tells the story of a student who told him, “I cannot come to class tomorrow. I have to go to tennis.”  Covey clarified, “You have to go to tennis?”  The student insisted that he did but after much probing came around to realizing he was choosing to go to tennis to avoid the consequence of being put off of the team.  The young grasped that he could go to class or he could go to tennis. The choice was his and he alone would bear the consequence. Once he accepted responsibility to make the choice, Covey told him, with a wink, “I’d go to tennis, too.” 

Are you willing to take responsibility for the choices you make?

A basic building block of success in life; emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually, is taking charge of your life. Are you in the habit of excusing the circumstances in which you find yourself while pointing to your spouse, your parents, your boss?  Playing the victim and waiting to be rescued are a recipe for failure.  We all have all the excuses we need to remain as we are. We can find a hundred reasons to avoid stepping up to make a change. Why? Because accepting responsibility for ourselves is hard. 

I can hear your objections. 

·         “Jerry, my parents were absent and I have terrible emotional scars.”  That may be true enough, but how long will you blame your choices on their failure?

·         “I lost my job in a cut-back and it devastated my financial situation.”  That happened to many people.  So, are you going to go on trying to hang onto the life you had, or are you going to realize that change has come and you’re the one in the driver’s seat to create that new future? 

·         “My spouse of 25 years walked out and left me a mess.”  That’s incredibly sad. Now you have a choice to use their sin against you as a reason to quit on life, or you can redefine life and find a future that does not include him. 

We cannot control the wind and weather. We will go through things we would not choose for ourselves. People and circumstances will, from time to time, become terribly tumultuous. There is but one God and neither I nor you are Him!  And yet … we have been given the power to choose our response.

In August, 2010, my mother’s physician told her in stark terms, “you have an advanced form of lung cancer.”  Her response inspires me to this day.  She crumpled into tears, sobbed as the reality sank in, then she went home and sought the Lord in prayer. She actively prayed for healing, asked for His guidance about treatment, and continued to live her life around a new reality. In 16 months that she lived after that diagnosis, she seldom, if never, complained; never played the victim, and choose to trust God – come what may.  As the disease advanced, she adjusted to the course, taking responsibility for each new day.  She, by the way, did not attempt to navigate those waters alone. She took responsibility to build a team of support for herself and her family.

The foundational choice that faces us each day of our lives is this:  will I accept the grace of God, given through Christ Jesus, and make Him Lord of this moment?  That very first sin involved a choice to listen to a lie and was followed by an excuse to avoid responsibility.  Let’s break the pattern! 

Here’s the word from the Word - "Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword?

As it is written: “For your sake we face death all day long; we are considered as sheep to be slaughtered.”

No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.
For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord." (Romans 8:35-39, NIV)