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3 lessons I wish I had learned earlier in life

3 Comments / Life Balance, Window into my Soul / Tom Stuart

“Teach us to number our days aright, that we may gain a heart of wisdom. Psalm 90:12

Some lessons I wish I had learned earlier in life. It’s been said that experience is the best teacher. Unfortunately that is not necessarily the case. Actually the best teacher is evaluated experience. Only those who seek to learn from bad experiences are destined not to repeat them. Evaluated experience leads to wisdom. And there is no better source of wisdom than perspective that comes from God inspired evaluation.

That is what this short prayer from Psalm 90 is all about. It is a prayer that I now pray frequently and have adopted as one of my life verses. It is noteworthy that Moses is the author of this Psalm. There is probably no one better qualified than him to pray so authoritatively for wisdom. After spending forty years exile in the wilderness evaluating his deadly misjudgments in Egypt he knew what it meant to number his days aright. And the heart of wisdom God imparted to him during that time positioned him at age eighty to begin a forty year run as one of the greatest leaders of all time.

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Managing life’s tensions

Last week at the Willow Creek Association’s annual Leadership Summit I heard a great message entitled the Upside of Tension. It was given by Andy Stanley, pastor of North Point Community Church in Georgia. His premise was that there are some tensions in life and in the church that are not meant to be resolved. In fact solving them will likely just create new tensions. They are tensions that are to be managed and not to be solved. Andy’s point was that proper management of them actually produces great benefit and progress.