Wednesday, February 25, 2009

The 5 Spokes of Chazown (final edition)

It's been over a week since the last post in the "chazown series." This is the FINAL post of my review/takeaways from the awesome book Chazown. I hope you've enjoyed it or gained something profitable from it. I hope it inspired you to seek God & figure out what YOUR chazown/life mission is & pursue it with all you've got. If you still need the book you can buy it HERE.
And you can catch up on the first 4 posts in this "chazown series" HERE, HERE, HERE, and HERE.

The last part of the book (Part 4) is all about the 5 little spokes of everybody's chazown. (Actually there's a Part 5 after this that's all about accountability. we all need peeps in our lives specifically to spur us on to go after our chazown...)
Here are the 5 spokes: my relationship with God, my relationship with people, my financial health, my physical health, my work.

Craig has a formula in the book to follow to reach your chazown = "Surrender my life to God and His Chazown for me + take care of the fundamentals (the 5 spokes) He puts before me + establish goals + take the next step + live with proper accountability = my God-given destiny will take care of itself!" WOW! seems pretty easy on paper. Since I read this I've been working hard to live this "formula" so that my destiny will "take care of itself."

I love the "next step" idea that works like this really cool analogy Craig wrote in his book = "When is a championship team successful? Is it only during the last seconds of the final game, when the crowd goes wild? No, that’s just the destination. The team’s true success began even before the first day of practice, when each player began building strength, stamina, and specialized skills. Every day that the team worked hard, learned to play together, listened tot the coach, grew from mistakes, won a game, or lost a game—every step of that journey was part of that team’s success."
That is SO AWESOME for me to hear... hopefully awesome for you to hear too. Andy writes a whole section about this concept of success in his book (Visioneering) that I have unofficially deemed the sequel to Chazown (you can read that idea HERE).

Since tons of books have been written on each of one these 5 "spokes", I'll just share a thought or two on each from the book.
1 - My Relationship with God = we all need to figure out WHICH PRACTICES help me BEST EXPERIENCE GOD and go after those. take away barriers that hurt those practices.
2 - My Relationships with People = Ask ourselves 4 questions -> What relationship needs to be initiated? What relationship needs to be nurtured? What relationship needs to be restored? What relationship needs to be severed?
3 - My Financial Health = there is a WHOLE LOT of good stuff in this chapter, so you really need to read it. I would just say this concerning our finanial health => 1) Give away all the money you can to God's Mission & the poor + 2) read, listen to, and DO everything Dave Ramsey has ever said! do those 2 things & you should be good to go. haha...
4 - My Physical Health = 80% of Americans 25 & up are OVERWEIGHT! WOW! & it is one of the top killers in America. SO, if you want to live your chazown, you've got to be alive to do it! exercise!
5 - My Work Life = “without a chazown for your work, God’s gift of life to you is likely to turn into one big exercise in gritting your teeth.” “When you’re doing the tasks God placed you here to do, there’s nothing you’d rather be doing.”

And that was the whole book, Chazown, in a nutshell of 5 posts on this blog. Hope you enjoyed it. Feel free to share any thoughts you have as always AND I've gota TONS more takeaways I'll be sharing from recent reads VERY soon.

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