Owning your success - a guest post by Donald Miller

Do you own your successes?

by Don Miller

About three weeks ago, I was fifty or so flight of stairs into my workout. I’m going to try to climb Mt. Hood in early June. The training has gone okay, but I have my doubts. I’ve not lost the weight I thought I’d lose, to be honest. That happened when I trained to ride my bike across the country, too, and everything turned out fine. And yet I worried. What if I didn’t make it? I started feeling defeated, even with eight more weeks to train. I began to wonder if I had what it took.

But I reasoned with myself. I thought about all that I’d done before, and reminded myself that I had, indeed, ridden a bike across America. Yeah, but, I thought to myself, that doesn’t count.

No kidding. That is what I actually thought. I had to stop for a minute. Now the truth is, I really did ride my bike across America. I rode around 3,000 miles in one summer (you can actually cross in less, but our team took a southern route, then turned north to add some miles for reasons I’ll never understand).

That’s when I realized, I don’t own my successes. So I kept climbing the stairs, and began to reflect on the idea that I will readily accept a failure, even meditate on it, but I won’t accept an accomplishment.

There’s nothing healthy about that.

The truth is, we operate out of who we believe we are. And God needs us to be strong, because there is important work to be done. God isn’t served when we can’t own our own accomplishments. He doesn’t want us arrogant, but He does want us confident. God has delivered us in the past (in partnership with our actions) and He can do so again.

I made a mental list of all my accomplishments. I thought about them as I climbed the stairs that day, and have come back to them since. I want to learn to own them, so I’ll be prepared the next time I’m challenged, so I won’t be burdened by doubt.

My question to you is, do you own your accomplishments? Do you own your failures? And if you own your failures, and not your accomplishments, why? Does God want you to disregard the memory of the things you’ve done well? I don’t think He does.

Would you mind doing something for me today? Would you pull out a sheet of paper, or open your journal, and list your accomplishments? Just keep a running list, all day. I think you’d be surprised at who you really are. I think you’d be surprised at what God could possibly call on you to accomplish.

Disclaimer: OK, so I may have been a bit misleading. Donald Miller (who, in case you don't know, is the bestselling author of A Million Miles In A Thousand Years and Blue Like Jazz -- and is known as drphil21 on World of Warcraft) didn't technically write this post specifically for brandonsneed.com. He may have written it for his blog, and I may have just copied and pasted it and then written a title for this post that made it sound a wee bit better than it actually was. 

What? Guy's gotta get a start somewhere, right? 

Anyway, to be somewhat serious, the reason I borrowed -- OK, hijacked -- his whole blog entry -- including corrections on his spelling and grammar errors, what a fine editor I am! -- is because it hits pretty close to home, touching on things in my life I've yet to write much about, at least obviously. Mostly because I get kinda bored writing about myself. 

But he said good things, and I like sharing good things.