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¹⁹Jesus gave them this answer: “I tell you the truth, the Son can do nothing by himself; he can do only what he sees his Father doing, because whatever the Father does the Son also does. -John 5:19

Did you ever do something you wanted to do or go somewhere you wanted to go, or get something you wanted to get and you didn’t enjoy it nearly as much as you should have?

When it comes to writing my own story, I’m very specific about what I want, my goals, my bucket list, and what I need to do. However, I’ve found that without seeking God about what to do, all of my striving and accomplishing will be in vain. I’ve done things I thought were going to be awesome, when it my heart I knew I shouldn’t, and I ended up not enjoying an experience at all.

The Bible says that the Blessings of the Lord makes one rich, and HE adds no sorrow to it. In other words, God is the only one who can enable you to truly enjoy your life and your experiences. Jesus only did what God told  Him to do, and as a result – He did everything He was supposed to do on earth.

The Bible says God will give you the desires of your heart, if you delight in Him. So whether you’re setting goals, planning a vacation, making a career move, or whatever else may be on your heart this year, make sure you know it in your heart it’s something God wants you to do. Because if it’s not, you’re going to get a second-class experience.

Over the holiday break I read this book by Donald Miller. Then I read his new year post and was inspired. Donald talks about the stories we write with our lives. He said this in his book:

“The ambitions we have will become the stories we live. If you want to know what a person’s story is about, just ask them what they want. If we don’t want anything, we are living boring stories.” -Don Miller

I’ve come to recognize that most people who are doing things with their lives that others envy, do them on purpose. They write their own stories. They set a goal, go after it, and have a story to tell after they accomplish it.

My question to you is, what stories do you want to tell at the end of 2010?

Maybe you want to:

• Run a marathon
• Travel somewhere that you’ve never been
• Take up biking
• Read 25 books
• Serve people less fortunate than you on a consistent basis
• Mentor people younger than you
• Get mentored by a great leader
• Go to the Superbowl

I don’t know what your desires and ambitions are. What I do know is that the only way you’ll write a stories worth talking about, is by writing them on purpose.

Take a day with your calendar and a journal and write out what you’d love to do this year (even if it seems outrageous) and make a plan to do it. Be specific – set a date, and go after it.

What stories do you want to write?

This was one of the first books I read on my new Kindle (I absolutely love it!). I’ve wanted to read this book since it came out, I had heard a lot of good things about it.

This is not a book I’d normally read. It wasn’t a principle book or even a practical one in which I could implement all the lessons I’ve learned. The whole book is about the author’s life experiences. Movie producers wanted to write a movie about his life, he agreed, and while writing the movie, he was asked to edit large parts of his life in order to make it more interesting. Through the experience he recognized that he had been living a pretty boring story.

What did he learn? That if we’re going to live interesting lives here on earth, if we’re going to live a great story, we need to do it on purpose. We need to write our stories, make them memorable, risk it all, and have as many adventures as we can.

Big Takeaway: Stop living a mediocre life and start building an amazing one on purpose.

Final Grade: 9/10 Buy it here!

Some Highlights:

• If what we choose to do with our lives won’t make a story meaningful, it won’t make a life meaningful either.

• If you aren’t telling a good story, nobody thinks you died too soon; they just think you died.

• Good stories don’t happen by accident, I learned. They are planned.
• “I tell good stories in books. I don’t live good stories.”

• People who live good stories are too busy to write about them.

• People love to have lived a great story, but few people like the work it takes to make it happen. But joy costs pain.

• The War of Art. The book is about writing, about the process of getting words onto an empty page. Pressfield said a writer has to sit down every day and write, regardless of how he feels.

• The ambitions we have will become the stories we live. If you want to know what a person’s story is about, just ask them what they want. If we don’t want anything, we are living boring stories

• And once you live a good story, you get a taste for a kind of meaning in life, and you can’t go back to being normal; you can’t go back to meaningless scenes stitched together by the forgettable thread of wasted time.

• When you stop expecting people to be perfect, you can like them for who they are.

• We don’t know how much we are capable of loving until the people we love are being taken away, until a beautiful story is ending.