Is your vessel half full or overflowing?

I heard a powerful sermon today and it made me think to myself, "Am I overflowing in God's love for my brother?" Pastor Miles talked about Facebook friends and the ease that you can "friend"  someone and not even know them personally.
In his series called Love Wins he talks about being "all in"  for a true friend.

Keeping the main thing the main thing!

A few years ago my friend Greg Gray told me that the primary focus should be to make the main thing the main thing. I finally got it. I used to have several things going on at once and I thought that it was impressive. I thought that that was just the way that I was and that I needed to have all of these things going on in my life to be productive.
Something happened with one of those things and I took some time to reflect and ask myself if I really needed to do it right now or if I should finish up the first project before I started something else. I finally realized that I should focus on the first thing alone and ride it to completion before starting something else.

What does it mean to work for yourself?

Let me begin by saying that being self employed and working for yourself are different. I will attempt to to explain the differences between being self employed and working for yourself.
When you are self employed you may own the business, but you really work for the client. Their schedule becomes your schedule and their compensation becomes your compensation. If it didn't then you wouldn't have the contract.
Most of us get stuck doing this (read the E-Myth Revisited) for example.
Working for yourself is different in that you control your schedule and compensation.
Do you want real control over your time and your life? Do you want freedom?

What is consistency?

I have learned many lessons throughout my life and the one lesson that I have seen pay off over and over is the lesson of consistency. Too often people start a task quickly expending a lot of time and effort. When they don't see the results that they had hoped for they get discouraged and quit.
I have learned time and time again that consistency is key. It doesn't matter how fast you start but how long that you persevere. Think of the story of the tortoise and the hare. They took off. The hare quickly built a large seemingly insurmountable lead. The tortoise was much slower than the hare, but he was consistent. As you remember, the hare became complacent and eventually the tortoise passed the hare with slow, consistent steps.

Is integration good for everyone?

In the month of February as we commemorate Black History, I thought of something very profound. I thought about a question that Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. himself asked. Is integration good for everyone?
Growing up as a child of the seventies, integration was seen as the panacea that would cure all of our ills as a race. We would be able to attend the same schools and live in the same neighborhoods as our Caucasian brothers and sisters. That's a good thing, right? I'm not a historian, but I know that many of us did better in places like Greenwood, Tulsa, Oklahoma known as Black Wall Street.
I came to the conclusion that integration without opportunity is worthless. Many of us could attend the same school or live in the same neighborhood without the same opportunities that other people have.