“Forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead.”   Philippians 3:13

Where do your past and future meet? Why, every single morning, of course. Every morning you face the challenge as a leader of putting the past into perspective and the future into focus. The trick is to keep either one from distorting the other.

How do you as a faith leader put the past into the best light? By understanding that the best features of the past, your successes and satisfactions, were all delivered to you by God’s grace and not by your own ingenuity. That tames our “achiever’s pride”. How about the worst pages in the story? They too were authored by the same God, and He gave you the grace to move through them into today. That tamps down our reflexive regrets.

And the future? Every morning we are tempted to go back to the past to find our future; back to the familiar, the tried, the predictable. As a leader in midlife, I have now had my share of experience with the idea of returning to the past. I’ve been asked to return to an old job or two, and to return to a geographic locale I once lived and worked in. Tempting, yes, but on the whole I wouldn’t recommend it, because that’s not where the future lives. The Scripture says His loving-kindness is new every morning for a reason: we’re meant to step into new challenges where we’ll need it.

Leader, which way will you be heading out of the door of decision this morning?