Pastor's Blog: Becoming Your Best Self
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This past week the ministerial staff and I attended an Enneagram workshop, which addressed the variety of personality types that exist among us humans and how one’s individual type influences every aspect of his or her life. For those of you not familiar with the Enneagram, it is basically a model of how nine personality types (“ennea” is nine in Greek) relate to one another to represent human behavior in its most natural expressions, along with what our behavior looks like when we’re healthy or what it looks like when we’re distressed.
I’ve done countless personality tests, and this one was no different in terms of what it revealed about me. When I am in my normal state, I lean toward consideration of others, with a particular bent toward doing what I can to give assistance to others. And when I am at my best, I recognize that I can be highly creative, but when I am at my worst, I can also be domineering and arrogant.
Like most folk, I am a complicated soul. I have my better angels and I have my shadow side. So, the key for me is to be aware enough about how I respond in the situations that come my way so that I can make sure that I am more prone to lean toward the former instead of the latter.
What was, however, different about this particular test was its conviction that we are born with our personalities, and while our environment may move us in a particular direction, at our core we are simply as God created us. That’s not to say that everything about us is fixed or that we are incapable of personal improvement. It is to say that if we are “hardwired” in a particular direction, we’d best make sure that we surround ourselves with healthy influences that are capable of bringing out the best in us and not the worst.
I would hope MBBC is one of those healthy influences for you and that you find in our fellowship the encouragement and support that you need to be developing into your best self, one that bears witness to the image of God in you. That’s because there are far too many influences in this world that would take you in the other direction, some of which represent themselves as working in your best interests when they really don’t.
I invite you as well to help me help others make progress in their journey of faith. Healthy churches aren’t just stable congregations, they are also faithful ones, which in the end is really what God calls us to be, both individually and together as the body of Christ.
“Examine yourselves to see whether you are in the faith; test yourselves. Do you not realize that Christ Jesus is in you – unless, of course, you fail the test?” (2 Corinthians 13:5)