Life Mapping with Jesus

Chapter 1 – The Gathering

Quiet! Can we hear it? What calls our hearts? Something deep inside is stirring. Will we listen, will we understand, and will we act? If we are ready we will! We are amazing creatures! No one else has our unique traits, skills, abilities and capacity for acquiring wisdom. With them we can do anything, but what will we do? To put the question another way: What is the most important thing we will do in our lifetimes? Some might answer; successfully raise children, have an enjoyable career or find the cure for cancer. These are all good answers. But, are they really the most important? Will they bring us happiness and peace of mind? Mencius, a Chinese Confucian and contemporary of Aristotle, was once asked an interesting question by his disciple Kung-too. “All are equally men, but some are great men, and some are little men----how is this?” Mencius replied, “Those who follow that part of themselves which is great are great men; those who follow that part which is little are little men. Let a man first stand fast in the supremacy of the nobler part of his constitution, and the inferior part will not be able to take it from him. It is simply this which makes the great man.” Thus we must discover our nobler part, or as Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) said, “Let each become all that he was created capable of being.” “Jesus saith unto them, My meat is to do the will of him that sent me, and to finish his work.” - John 4:34, should we do less?

Life Mapping is a process that helps us reach our full potential. It helps us remove the conflicts that separate us from becoming the person we were created to be. These conflicts exist because of the inconsistencies in what we think about, what we believe, and ultimately what we do. It is these conflicts that confine and confuse us and keep us from becoming the person we are capable of becoming. When the conflicts are gone, we feel whole. It is a healing process that allows us to reach our nobler part. We learn who we are and how we fit into this world. It is a process that calls those seeking their nobler part. It is “The Gathering” of our nobler parts.

What have we lost? Have we noticed that Americans have become angry? For more than half of the twentieth century we could walk down the street and receive pleasant greetings from almost everyone. Advertisements featured smiling people. Early television was dominated by shows like Ozzie and Harriet. Ozzie always had a smile on his face, even when he was mischievous. Sometime during the period from the mid-1950s to the end of the 1960s, our mood changed. Was it the Vietnam War? Are we angry with ourselves for being in it or losing it? Are we angry that some of our heroes were assassinated, John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Robert Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King? Whatever the reason, notice the results. Start looking at advertising, listening to some of the hard driving modern music, the way people drive their cars, or the looks people give us when we walk down the street. As Hall of Famer Harmon Killebrew put it, “The thing I notice (with today’s ballplayers) is that they don’t seem to be having as much fun as we used to.” Even our high priced entertainers seem mad at the world.

Many of them act out this feeling in the way they perform and conduct their lives. It is not a pretty picture. If we have to be tough to survive, that will be the image we project. Madison Avenue calls it attitude! Is this how a civilized society should act? Why are we so angry? Why do we fly off the handle when things don’t go our way? Isn’t the average American better off now then during the 1930s? Maybe some people feel guilty they have so much. Maybe our sincere desire to do a good job has diminished. Maybe, we now expect people to look out for themselves, so we must be tough and look out for ourselves. Could our anger be a result of a feeling that no one else cares about us? Are we alone? Is it isolationism at its worst? David Myers, psychologist from Hope College in Michigan, tells us that when it comes to happiness, “External circumstances matter surprisingly little, whether you’re wealthy or physically disabled matter so much less than you’d guess.” He researched thousands of studies on happiness to determine who is happy and why. The results of his work are found in his book The Pursuit of Happiness. Happy people should exhibit happy behavior. The average American’s behavior during the last fifty years does not suggest that we are happy. This is true even though we have more of the external trappings and generally better circumstances than those living in the prior fifty years. Thus, works like The Pursuit of Happiness are leading us toward the answer. We must look within ourselves if we are to find happiness. We must change our attitudes. “A merry heart doeth good like a medicine: but a broken spirit drieth the bones.” - Proverbs 17:22.