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| Photo credit: Jennifer Vander Klipp |
So while I’m working away at my company—Tandem Services—on a
daily basis, I’m also thinking about my goals and how I want to go about
achieving them. I have a lot of freedom in my day, what’s the best way to make
use of that?
I like the acronym SMART (specific, measurable, actionable,
reasonable, time-sensitive) for setting goals. A lot has been written about
that and posted elsewhere so I’m not going to go into that. What I am going to
do is reveal a secret I think many of us have.
I don’t know what my goals are right now.
Yep. I said it. No goals. I know there are some things I
want to do (repaint most of the house, clean the garage, bake bread, yada yada
yada), and I have projects for my company that need to be done, each with their
own steps and goals. I had very specific reasons for wanting to leave my job
and come home. But those are values, not goals.
For the past seven years my goal could have been boiled down
to one thing: survival. I was a single mom. I had to jumpstart my career, keep
food on the table, keep a roof over our heads. I battled Lyme disease, fought
for my autistic son to get school services, schlepped my ailing daughter from
doctor to specialist to the hospital trying desperately to discover why she was
declining so quickly to the point of being unable to walk until we got a
diagnosis of juvenile rheumatoid arthritis. I was in the Midwest; my family in
California. I fought daily the push-pull tide of taking care of my kid and
taking care of my job.
My daughter learned to walk again and got out of the
hospital. I bought us a house. A project house, but something that a landlord
couldn’t raise the rent on or put up for sale out from under us. I got married
and had someone to share this crazy journey with, to shoulder the burdens with
me and share in the delight and joy.
Even when survival was my only goal, I accomplished
something I didn’t intentionally start out to do. I learned to trust God more
fully, deeply, completely each day. My personality type is to complete things,
check things off lists. Be the giver, not the receiver. And through that season
of life, I could rarely do any of those things. I couldn’t set a goal, list the
steps, and then set out to achieve it. I had to rely on God in a way I’d never
had to before. To put food on our table, a roof over our heads. To provide me
with a job that paid the bills and had the flexibility I needed to take care of
my children. To put knowledgeable doctors in our path.
This is my secret bone to pick with goals: they are fine in
their place, but they do have a place. Goals are not the solution to your
life’s problems (oh, I wish they were!). They’re important. They provide order
and structure and direction. They allow us to be good stewards of our time,
gifts, and resources. Yet they all must remain in their place, subservient to
God’s desires for my life and what He wants to accomplish in me in this season.
So in this next season of life (I’m not going to put a time
limit on it, but I suspect it could take all summer) I’m going to allow myself
to be goal-less, to think about possibilities, to be reasonable about what I
can accomplish in this season of life, to dream and imagine and pray. At the
end, if I only have one goal, that’s okay.
It’ll know its place.
