Friday, February 1, 2008

Self Respect

Martin Luther King, Jr. Knew Himself


A man named Charles Handy of Europe seems to have a great way of talking about the real important things of life. The way Handy put it in his book, The Hungry Spirit , was this:

“I spent the early part of my life trying hard to be someone else. At school I wanted to be a great athlete, at university an admired socialite, afterwards a businessman and, later, the head of a great institution. It did not take me long to discover that I was not destined to be successful in any of these guises, but that did not prevent me from trying, and being perpetually disappointed with myself. The problem was that in trying to be someone else I neglected to concentrate on the person I could be. … I was, in retrospect, hiding from myself, a slave to the system rather than its master.”





I have been teaching a class called, "How to be me in my Family Tree" and it garners a lot of interest. How can we embrace who we are and allow God to bring out of that what we do?

By refusing to acknowledge and embrace ourselves fully we struggle to emulate someone else and end up being nobody. The most important thing we can do as Christian leaders is help people face themselves and find joy rather than depression in the discovery.

Who have you failed to be as you grew toward yourself?

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