A friend wrote me an email about a teaching project she’s working on.  “A number of times,” she said, ” you have written about ‘who do you want to be’ vs. ‘what do you want to do’. And the more planning I put into this, the more I want this to be the core of what we begin with.”

A couple months ago I wrote “How do you want to be when you grow up?” I asked “What do you want to be true of you as a leader in five years?” And I followed it with “Making an intentional change that will help in five years.”

Say that one of the things that I want to be true of myself is, “I want to be a person that isn’t afraid to depend on God. “

To learn to become that kind of person, I would have to look at people who weren’t afraid to depend on God. I can find five pretty quickly. There are more.

• In Joshua 24, Joshua gathers the leaders of Israel and in a last lecture reviews their shared history and says “choose which god you want to serve. But me? I’ll serve God to the end.” 
• Joshua’s mentor, Moses, had made the same kind of speech (we read it in Deuteronomy). 
• Mary starts her work with a statement of trust in God.
• Paul says the same kind of things to Timothy (2 Timothy 4) and
• Jesus says that he’s done what God asked him to do, nothing more and nothing less (John 12:44-50, for example.) 

Then I would study the lives of those people, looking for the points at which they stated, and acted on, their dependence. I would look for the influences on their lives. I would look for patterns.

And then I would start living out their pattern.