One of my favorite baseball quotes comes from Sparky Anderson, the manager who took the Cincinnati Reds and the Detroit Tigers to World Series Championships.
I once heard Sparky say: “Good pitching will always beat good hitting—and vice versa.”
I love that quote! It makes no sense at all—and yet somehow it does.
Another baseball great, Yogi Berra, is famous for these kinds of quotes. One of my favorites from him is about a popular restaurant. He said, “Nobody goes there anymore because it’s too crowded.”
Again, this makes no sense—and yet somehow it does. How can these nonsensical statements of opposites make no sense and yet somehow still make sense?
I’m a relatively new leader, and as such, I have a soft spot in my heart for others who are new to leadership. It’s a challenging and exciting time. I’ve been blessed to be surrounded by amazing leaders in my life and work. Several of them have taken the time to invest in my development as a leader, and in this post I’m going to share some of their advice that I’ve found especially helpful. Continue reading →
This is the second post in a series on Vows. You may want to read Part 1 before you continue.
Ever play the game of warmer and colder in order to find a hidden object? I’m going to suggest at the end of this segment that you play a version of this to help you get to a new level of Christian leadership.
As you learned in the first post in this series, vows can be positive, like the vows taken at a wedding. But many are negative and hidden from us—formed early in life and based on immature knowledge and perspective.
Vows often arise out of traumatic experiences that caused us pain. They are often created as a way to avoid this same pain in the future.
Vows can really miss the mark when they’re formed, and it’s not uncommon for them to last a lifetime.
Here’s how vows are often formed:
A significant and maybe traumatic event happens. Using the example I shared in my last post, my parents got a divorce.
We then make some kind of meaning out of what happened. In my case, as an eight-year-old boy I assumed I had done something wrong that caused the divorce. This is not at all the meaning I would have made of it several years later, but it is what I understood then.
Based on this meaning, a vow is formed. In my case I vowed to be a better boy, which might make my parents get back together. I also vowed to protect my heart—not really in those words or even in an understandable way, but I began to keep people at arm’s length so I could stay safe in case they also left me.
So, again, it goes like this:
Something happens
We make meaning out of it
We make a vow that helps us live when this happens again.
Here are several other examples of how vows are formed:
After something happened a little girl makes meaning that God can’t be trusted, so she vows to not trust God
A little boy comes to believe he is not a good person, so he stops worrying about being even trying to be good.
A girl comes to believe she’s dumb so she decides not to even try in school.
Each time a boy acts silly in his living room, people seem to love it. In fact, they seem to love him. So he learns to act silly a lot looking for more love. The older he gets, the less it seems to work so he starts acting sillier yet and becomes the class clown the rest of his life in order to get “love.”
This list could go on and on.
A problem with vows is that we are often blind to them. They may have been created when we were very young, and they were created unintentionally so at a young age they just become part of who we are and part of how we believe the world works.
So as Christian leaders, what do we do with this knowledge about vows?
Start looking for the vows you made as a child and how they are affecting you yet today.
If you had events that created strong positive emotions as a kid or strong negative emotions as a kid, you probably drew some meaning from that and then created a vow for how to live life based on that meaning.
Start looking for where you are blind to how you are. Others might have to help you with this because it’s pretty hard to see what you are blind to!
Then pick a vow or rule that isn’t serving you well and make a new vow to replace it. It might be one of the vows below:
Start trusting God where you hadn’t before
Start trusting others where you hadn’t before
Start seeing that you’re God’s beloved and that God didn’t make you bad or dumb or ugly or whatever the case may be.
Start seeing that you don’t need to earn people’s love with your humor or martyrdom or excessive niceness.
Then start living into this new vow.
It will feel strange at first. It will feel wrong at times: after all it might be 180 degrees different from how you used to live, which felt right at one time.
This is best done when a few people who love you know you’re making this change. They can help you know if you’re getting warmer or colder. Because you’re often blind to the thing you’re changing, you need people to give you this kind of ongoing “warmer or colder” feedback until you get the change embedded in the new you.
And finally, if you’re inclined to watch movies, there are three that I really like with regards to vows:
The first, The Kid starring Bruce Willis, is great fun. It’s a great family movie that will make you laugh and cry, and see the power of a vow made as a child.
The second, Antwone Fisher starring Denzel Washington, is a much more intense story of a man facing his childhood and the meaning he made back then, and the subsequent rules that he lived by that needed to change for a healthy future.
The third, Good Will Hunting starring Matt Damon, is my favorite movie. The language is very crude and the movie is not at all appropriate for a younger audience. It is a great story about the power of vows and how destructive they can be.
If you watch any of them, see if you can identify the vow or vows that were created and needed to be changed.
I hope that you have success as you seek to change some of the vows you’ve made that are hurting your life, and, as always, I pray you experience God’s rich blessings!
Listen to the five-minute Vows: Part 1 audio program from Coach’s Corner.
Some days my posts are pretty simple and even playful. Other days I’m in the mood for going deep into the really important areas of who we are. Today is one of those “going deep” days.
Today I’m talking about vows. Vows are powerful rules within our own personal operating system that impact how we behave. Vows can be positive, like the vows taken at a wedding. But many are negative and hidden from us, formed early in life and based on immature knowledge and perspective.
Vows often arise out of a traumatic experience that caused us pain. Vows are often made as a way to avoid this same pain in the future.
Here are two examples of vows I made in my own childhood:
When I was around eleven years old I got caught shoplifting one Saturday morning. It was scary being pulled into the store manager’s office with him telling me what a bad thing I did. He told me he should call the cops, but instead said he would call my dad, insisting that I give him my name and phone number.
I remember waiting for what seemed like forever for my dad to pick me up.
I remember being upset that I got caught, because I had gotten pretty good at shoplifting.
I remember surviving the punishment.
I also remember being back in the same stores again where I had done a lot of my shoplifting.
I remember being tempted to steal again—not because I wanted the toy or candy or whatever it was—but because it felt like a challenge to do it again and not get caught.
I remember a silent voice saying something like “don’t do it… don’t cross this line again… it only leads to bad places.” Today I thank God for that voice!
This scene played itself out a few more times over the coming months and over time I made a silent, secret vow never to steal again. This silent vow was a positive one, and it was also an intentional one. I was very conscious of it for many years.
But many vows are not so positive. And many are not at all intentional. These are important vows to understand because these more hidden vows turn into the unhealthy rules of life that we don’t even know we have.
Here’s a second traumatic example from my own life:
When I was eight, my parents got a divorce. I had no clue it was coming, or even what a divorce was. At that time, back in the ’60s, I didn’t have any friends whose parents got a divorce. This was confusing to me. This little boy tried to make sense of it all and that was pretty tough.
Like most kids in this kind of situation I figured I must have done something to cause the divorce. Based on this meaning that I made out of this confusing situation, this little version of me made some rules about how life should be lived.
Yikes, that is scary. An eight-year-old trying to make sense of divorce—of a very complicated adult situation—and then making a rule to live by based on what happened.
I actually made two vows. The first was to be a better boy hoping that would make a difference and even bring my parents back together again. Not a bad rule, though I certainly broke it a time or two—or a hundred.
The other vow I made was more subtle and less understood. I vowed to protect my heart because I never wanted it to hurt again like it did then. You might hope that this second vow only lasted a few years before being revisited and revised. The problem was that I didn’t even know I made it!
So as I grew, into my teens, into my twenties, and even into my thirties, I kept people at arm’s length without even knowing it. I never became aware of this vow until my mid-thirties. By that time this innocent little vow—made by an eight-year-old boy—had taken a toll on my life, especially in my closest relationships and also in my ability to love and lead people.
I have since tried to replace that vow with a healthier one created by an adult who has greater understanding and perspective. This new vow is to love people fully even though they may hurt me.
When I look at my parents’ divorce now, I have a very different perspective than I did when I was eight. I realize that the eight-year-old me didn’t cause the divorce, and therefore didn’t need to try and fix it, which didn’t work anyway as you might have guessed. I also know God now and I didn’t then. I know that God will always be with me.
God who loves me more than any other can. God who loved me first so I can love others fully and without fear.
Even if another person does hurt me, I have confidence that God will give me the strength I’ll need to survive and even thrive. God will help me get through the hurt that might come, whether intended or not.
This is a vow I’m still learning to live into. It’s a good vow that I want to nurture. The vow I had from the age of eight was not a good vow and it caused me to miss out on a lot.
In my next post I’m going to tell you when vows tend to form and how you can change them. Until then, I pray you experience God’s rich blessings!