Fall’s Fresh Focused Fantastic Fans

I love the fall. To me it’s the season of new beginnings. I guess this goes back to beginning the new school  year as a kid. I loved the fresh start of new books and empty notebooks. The break in the summer heat is welcome. Every football team is undefeated. Every football fan loves this time of the year.

I know its only mid-August but the daily rains seem to have broken the back of the oppressive heat and at least a few leaves are falling. I’ve already started acting like it’s fall. I’ve planted seeds for a fall garden and the new plants are emerging.

Fall seems to me a better time for fresh starts than the days of New Year resolutions or the “new life” season of spring. That brings me to Fall’s Fresh Focused Fantastic Fans. I’ll be leading a group on Sunday nights at my home church, Amana Christian Fellowship in Maurice. It’s a project I’ve had in the works for years.

In the 90’s I was fascinated by Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change which was first published in 1990, and it continues to be a business bestseller with more than 10 million copies sold.  The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People is one of the most influential audiobooks ever recorded. It presents a principle-centered approach for solving personal and professional problems. The 7 Habits have become famous because they work. The project was rekindled for me this summer when I heard by first grader great grand child reciting the 7 habits. She had learned them in school.

Wouldn’t it be great to combine the principles of Covey’s book with the potency of change that comes with a life transformed by the new birth that comes with following Jesus? The essence of the 7 Habits is the substitution of a “character” ethic for the “personality” ethic which the author sees as the current ethic of our culture. In the “personality” ethic, appearance trumps substance. Self help courses teach manipulation of others and “effective presentation.” Covey says: “our problems and pain are universal and increasing and the solutions to the problems are and always will be based on universal, timeless, self-evident principles common to every enduring, prospering society throughout history.”

The Fantastic Focused Follower sessions will energize many of the principles of the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People,  which are already generally consistent with scripture, by solidifying them with biblical truth. Covey’s principles, while a great improvement over an unprincipled life, are vague and subjective. They lack the clarity and power of “absolute truth” and the authority of God-given law. Covey provides “universal” principles trying to help everyone, regardless of spiritual belief. But as we Christians know, there is absolute truth and only through the new birth in Christ is a real permanent “character” change possible.

Image internationally acclaimed principles empowered by the Holy Spirit. That’s what Fantastic Focused Follower is about. I hope you will consider joining us at Amana at 6 p.m. on Sunday evenings for 12 weeks beginning August 30. The sessions will only last an hour. Some of us with eat supper together after the meetings at various eateries around town.

Between now and the beginning of the sessions, I will use this “bully” blog to try to entice you to join us. Hope you will join us in this exciting way to become one of Fall’s Fresh Focused Fantastic Fans of Jesus.