SMART Goals

Your short-term mission was a small, but significant point in your life’s journey.  The name of the E-Zine is The Next Mile. An important step in negotiating your “next mile” on this journey is to know where you want to go. What is your plan? One way to help you stay on course is to set goals. These goals will serve a road map.

One tool for helping people set goals is the acronym SMART. Each letter represents a characteristic of the goal. When crafting your goals, be sure they are Specific, Measurable, Attainable, have a Return on investment, and a Target date.

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Finding Your S.H.A.P.E for Ministry

While on the mission field you no doubt exercised your God-given gifts for ministry. It’s very possible that God stretched your faith and you saw yourself serving in ways you never imagined.  It’s important to keep that momentum upon returning home.  We must be intentional to not allow for stagnation to set in in our service to God.

Discovering your S.H.A.P.E. will help you be intentional about discovering how God created you for ministry.  S.H.A.P.E. is an acrostic that stands for:  Spiritual Gifts, Heart (or Passion), Abilities, Personality and Experience.  Understanding your S.H.A.P.E. will help you find and start fulfilling God’s Kingdom purpose for your life. 

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But I’ve Got a Great Personality!

Personality, everybody has one, some even have more than one!  The challenge is recognizing and understanding the strengths and challenges of our own personality and how we relate to people with other personality types.

Before you headed to the field, your team may have gone through a personality profile of some kind.  If not, it could be very insightful for you take a personality profile of some kind.  There are heaps out there, but over the years, we have found the DISC Profile to be an excellent tool.

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Seek Godly Counsel

We were at a crossroads in our ministry, we had a vision of developing an itinerant ministry to serve rural churches in the US, but we did not want to make a decision in a vacuum, so we called together three godly couples that we love and respect, who know us well and whom we trust.  As we visited, it became evident that we needed to make a move from our current situation sooner rather than later, but not in the direction of the itinerant ministry we had envisioned.

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Guides for the Journey!

If you were going to climb Mount Everest, you wouldn’t leave base camp alone.  If you wanted to make it to the summit, you would have a Sherpa guiding you to the top.  Sherpas have lived in the Himalayas for over 300 years.  Their bodies have adapted to the high altitudes and they are intimately acquainted with the terrain and trails.  Your journey into missions may look like a huge mountain shrouded in fog to you as you begin your journey.   Rather than seeking to climb this mountain alone, your journey will be more fulfilling and filled with less pain and heartache if you take the journey with a Sherpa!

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