Thursday, May 25, 2006

Practicing Greatness


Recently, I have had this nagging sense that I need to quickly restore some discipline in a few areas of my life. With the frantic pace of life in the past year, I have allowed a few areas to simply lose the traction required to sustain a long-term run. All I needed was a push in the right direction.

That push came in the form of an email almost two weeks ago to the day. I received a leadership email that lands in my inbox a couple times a month. This particular email was advertising a new book. I do not typically respond to product purchasing opportunities in emails. However, that personal tendency gave away to a quick book purchase several days ago. I followed a few links about the book and quickly decided to pull the trigger. I am glad I did.

Practicing Greatness unpacks seven disciplines of extraordinary spiritual leaders. I am only a few pages in, but I am really digging the direction the author is taking me.

I was stunned by the opening line. The author began with an Elton Trueblood statement he heard while attending seminary, "Deliberate mediocrity is a sin." WOW. In some areas of my life, I am "guilty." I will change that.

1 comment:

Pat said...

Thanks for the oush toward greatness, Tom!
I think it's too easy for all of us to fall into patterns we can't sustain over time. We can't let the daily grind replace what Eugene Peterson calls "a long obedience in the same direction."