Encouraging - Uniqueness

“Teach your children to choose the right path, and when they are older, they will remain upon it” (Proverbs 22:6).

The proverb invites us to teach our children according to each one’s unique “bent,” their natural inclination and learning style. And if we work in concert with our children’s uniqueness, they won’t depart from their God-given bent even as they age. If we were working with wood to fashion a bow for hunting, we would bend the wood in the way it is formed rather than to try to refashion it by bending it in the opposite direction. The wisdom of Proverbs 22:6 is to find and follow our child’s natural bent. This is not a guarantee of success, but a practical guideline that leads to parenting well.

Dan B. Allender, How Children Raise Parents: The Art of Listening to Your Family (Waterbrook Press, Colorado Springs, CO: 2003), 31.

Encouraging - Loyalty

Loyalty is essential to leadership. The wise leader cultivates loyalty by being loyal – loyal to the Lord, loyal to the truth, and loyal to the people he leads. Nothing is more destructive of leadership than the leader who compromises his own loyalty….Leadership hinges on trust, and trust is cultivated by loyalty. Where trust is born and respect is maintained, sacrificial, devoted service is rendered. Another way to say this is that our hearts have to be in our people, and our people have to be in our hearts.

John MacArthur, The Book on Leadership (Thomas Nelson, Nashville, TN: 2004), 70-71.

Encouraging - Servant Leadership

A leader is not someone who is consumed with his own success and his own best interests. A true leader is someone who demonstrates to everyone around him that their interests are what most occupy his heart. A real leader will work hard to make everyone around him successful. His passion is to help make the people under his leadership flourish. That is why a true leader must have the heart of a servant.

John MacArthur, The Book on Leadership (Thomas Nelson, Nashville, TN: 2004), 12.

Encouraging - Success

People don’t rise from nothing. We do owe something to parentage and patronage. The people who stand before kings may look like they did it all by themselves. But in fact they are invariably the beneficiaries of hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies that allow them to learn and work hard and make sense of the world in ways others cannot. It makes a difference where and when we grew up. The culture we belong to and the legacies passed down by our forebears shape the patterns of our achievement in ways we cannot begin to imagine. It’s not enough to ask what successful people are like, in other words. It is only by asking where they are from that we can unravel the logic behind who succeeds and who doesn’t. Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Success (Little, Brown & Company, NY, NY: 2008), 19.

As we start a new year and set new goals for ourselves. It is always good to ask ourselves how do we define success? Success is such an interesting term. To one man, success is judged by one’s bank account, to another the size of his family and to another his obedience to God. How one defines success will dictate how we arrange our lives. Missing from Gladwell’s insightful book is a discussion of God’s handiwork behind the scenes (to be fair, that wasn’t his audience), a fairly narrow definition of success and a failure to offer concrete answers…although that may be his point. Regardless, he does offer some interesting stories which propel us to think more deeply and ask ourselves difficult questions. It’s a very fun read and for those in education, some compelling chapters.