Goal Clarification

When is the last time you clarified your goals? Every so often, I realize that I've wandered into a foggy place and need to get my bearings again. This weekend was a wake-up: time to clarify goals. Most of the time, to be honest, I feel very much like a man swimming against a great current: the daily "to do," the moods of others, the demands of prior commitments, the dictates of the body: flotsam and jetsam hurled against the drowning consciousness by the tsunami of time.

Certainly, I'm convinced that a disciplined life, lived with clear goals and embracing beloved simplicity, would be a better life. I'm convinced it would be better for me and for my family. Yet, the fickelness of my nature, even as it desires this, is then swept up to that other thing. I'm like that guy in C.S. Lewis' Screwtape Letters who, beginning to consider the state of his soul, is put off the scent by lunch.

Today, though, today I have found some resolve in the bottom of a pocket. Perhaps it is the growing lightness of every day, or God's mercy, or the clutching and "golluming" of fleshly desperation (probably all and more), but today I am resolved to remember my goals. To seek them out, to state them, to share them. To say, "There they are," and turn my harried bark according to their stars.

Is goal-setting a sin? Is this putting too much faith in one's own abilities? Is this buying into our "over-achievement" culture and its soul-killing definitions of success? Answer: it can be. Like everything else in life, there is danger involved in goal setting. Goals can be idols. Therefore, one must always remember the first commandment. One must remember that life is lived in the presence of God, who is the real governor of our days. Goal setting is not a sinful process if one remembers that it is but a human process, and subject, then, to human limitations.