Walk With The (Sean) Wise

Two days from now, I will be going in for my annual performance review. Having been through three of these since becoming an officer in The Salvation Army, I really don't mind going for it. In fact, I usually enjoy the feedback and recommendations for developing as an officer and as a person. The hardest part of the entire process for me is completing the self-evaluation. I'm nervous that I may mark myself too high on a category and give the impression that I think too highly of myself. I also don't want to give too low a mark on something and seem self-deprecating. Any time I'm in that situation, it feels like a tightrope to walk and balance. I'd much rather just let someone else tell me what they think of me than tell them what I think of myself. But then I remember that God has already given me the ability to appropriately evaluate myself. The Apostle Paul wrote in Romans 12:3 (New Living Translation), "Be honest in your evaluation of yourselves, measuri...

My five-year-old son loves to use the word "perseverance." Because of the size of the word and his young age, I asked him one day I asked him if he even knew what that word meant. "It means don't give up!" he answered enthusiastically. I never doubted his understanding again. Over the past six weeks, I've done something that has required me to practice perseverance more than possibly ever in my life - a workout routine designed exclusively to increase the number of push-ups I can do in one set to 100. A couple days from now, I will put my body to the test to see if I can make that 100 mark in a single set. I'm honestly much more likely to believe it now than I was when I started! Six weeks ago, my single-set maximum before my muscles gave out was a total of 16 push-ups. In my first workout with this program, my total after five sets was 37 - not much more than a third of my overall one-set goal. This morning, my five-set total was 215 push-ups - ...

I wish I could write images, because I see things a lot more clearly than I say them most of the time. Words don't come as easily as I would like, or this blog would be a lot more active than it has been. I've been reminded by several of my writing friends that being able to write regularly comes with practice, and so it's practice that I need to get. I've recently found that words don't even flow from me talking as well as they once did, and to be completely honest, I'm not okay with that. And so, starting today, I will attempt to write daily. I'm not limiting a time frame for this because I want it to become a habit. Hopefully the things I have to say in writing will find some way to benefit even one person. At this point, I'm hoping to benefit from them myself as well. One cool thing is, I'm already developing ideas for tomorrow's post. I want my writings to serve two main purposes. The first is, I want my readers to have a window in whi...