If it killed me I was determined not to be a messy Mercy.
I was NOT going to be someone who needed a GPS, a map, and a “call a friend” lifeline to get from their home to the grocery store. I was not going to be an emotional geyser every five minutes. I was not going to be disorganized and useless. Yes, that is really how I felt. What was the point of having this built-in fiber optic connection to heaven if I couldn’t convert any of the beauty into a transformational reality? I had seen too much of the Mercy tendency to believe in the existence of a reality before it became one. It was far too easy to live in the world of anticipation and never get to the work of making it real. I had seen too much of my own behavior. I was hard on myself and my entire tribe.
I set about the task with typical Mercy stubbornness and started lobbing mortar shells at anything that moved. I carried on this way for a few years, blasting away at all the weaknessess I saw. There was improvement, to be sure. I had identified some real weaknessness.
Eventually, I had to stop and take stock of things. I let the dust settle a bit so I could see what was left. The question of “who am I” was always there in the background, but now it pushed itself forcefully to the front. Who Was I? Or what was left of me? At that moment I resembled a piece of Swiss cheese more than anything.
This is when God showed up. He had not been particularly responsive to all my frustrated questions of “WHY?!!? WHY did you make an impossible combination? How am I supposed to be ME?” In fact, He usually flat-out ignored me. So, I would go back to my mortar shells and blast away again.
But now He came, quietly, and simply turned my perspective, like the tiny shift of a kaleidoscope that causes a new cascade of colors to appear. I realized He had not responded to me because my entire focus was trained on what I was NOT going to be. This left Him very little room to answer the question of who I was.
You can pursue excellence out of an aversion to the alternative. Or you can pursue excellence because it is part of the original design. What drives you makes all the difference in the world.
Because my main focus was on what I didn’t want to be, I consistently lobbed mortar shells when a sniper’s shot was the better choice. I would shut down, board up and suppress all my emotions, or all of my intuition so that none of it would endanger my Anti Messy Mercy policy. Here is where I made tragic mistakes that I am still undoing. I killed a lot of good along with the bad – and this because my focus was on eradicating the bad, not on preserving the good.
I am convinced that this matters immensely. When you have a sense of the good, of the original design, of God’s fingerprint, you can cut away at the weaknesses while still preserving and developing the core that God made. Your picture doesn’t even have to be complete. Perhaps you only know a small portion of your design, but you focus on what you are building, not what needs to be destroyed. It begins with God.
His way is to begin with what He made.
I wonder how many of you are functioning under a similar perspective as I had. You might take a look at the things you are pursuing in life, the goals you have set for yourself and see what is the driving force behind them. Is it a “NOT to be” or is it a “TO be”? Your goals in themselves may be perfectly fine. But if you discover that you have a lot of “NOT to be” floating around, I would strongly encourage you to seek God about what is the good you are trying to achieve by overcoming the weaknesses. What is the end result? What is the picture He has imprinted in your spirit?
You are not defined by what you are not. You are defined by what you are.
Beyond the Horizon 
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