Jeff Baker

March 5th, 2015

“You excel at knowing and doing, how are you at being?” a friend asked me several weeks ago, on the beaches of Hawaii.

As I contemplated the question, I struggled.  Much of who I am, my personality, my successes, my mistakes, and my whole approach to life is about knowing and doing.  In fact our world endorses and rewards me and just about everyone for it wholeheartedly. Our culture screams “Happiness is about knowing more and doing more. Get to work and make it happen!”

My personal gifts enable me to understand the details of problems, suggest a solution and lead others to accomplish that solution. However, these gifts are also my proclivities for sin. Too easily, I seek identity and value in the knowledge I have and what I can do with it. There is not much mental room to think about the state of my heart and this whole “being” thing.

Several weeks ago, this idea of being  was aloof and intangible, something akin to a monk. For me, life has always been about grabbing your bootstraps and pulling as hard as you can.

Over the past several weeks, as I have been turning this idea of being over and over in my mind I have been wondering, really, what good is the knowledge I possess or the things I accomplish if it is all for the sake of more success? As King Solomon said in Ecclesiastes 1:14, it can all be “vanity and striving after wind.”

I do not know how to tell you or me to “be” more. I am ignorant there. I am asking God to develop this in me. But one thing I have come to learn lately, is that as I understand more how to be, being a child of the living God, being alive/abiding in Christ, that out of my being, my knowing and doing has purpose and meaning.

I am thankful my friend challenged me about rebooting my operating priorities. Now I am going to challenge you. How are you at being?

 ~Jeff Baker is Senior Consultant at Guidacent, Inc.