Who am I? Who Will I Be?

After last week’s bucket list planning, this week I got thinking about who I wanted to be through all of these adventures.  Seven Hitz and James Ritchie co-authored a book called ‘The Ministry of Business’ that outlines some tips to business success. I was reading a part this week that he spoke about making a personal constitution.  He said to start out by listing our values out one by one.  The next step was to number them all in order of priority. The point is to make sure we know what we want to base our decisions on before we’re at a critical decision moment.

               As I was wondering what my constitution should be, I realized that I am not the man I want to be in the future; I am barely the man I want to be right now!  Let’s think about the United States though. The United States of America was founded on the constitutional belief that ‘all men are created equal’ and that every man is bestowed by God with ‘certain unalienable rights’ which include ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’. But wait, didn’t some of the founding fathers own slaves? Didn’t women and African-Americans have to fight for their right to vote, and aren’t civil rights a hot topic of debate in this country to this day?  How could those be core beliefs if they aren’t even in practice?

               Therein lies the secret. According to the fount of all wisdom, google, a constitution is, “a body of fundamental principles or established precedents according to which a state or other organization is acknowledged to be governed” (italics added).  That word acknowledged is the key.  When we acknowledge to be governed by something, we accept it as fact and rely on it. If it were simply written, “is to be governed”, then it MUST be true without exception.  In our personal constitution, we write what we acknowledge to be our governing principles.  We are human and we are weak, so sometimes we may get distracted or confused and we will fail.  Like the United States of America, we may not live up to our personal constitution immediately.  It may take us years and years of hard work, but we’ll grow closer to abiding by our constitution with each ounce of effort we put towards it. 

               With that in mind, we have to write out our constitution as soon as we can in order to strive to live by it.  We don’t need it to be full of things that we already do perfectly, but we need it to be what we hope to one day become.  Jefferson, Washington and Franklin knew that the USA wasn’t a world power by any means, but they hoped that one day it would become a bastion of freedom.  In the same way, we can hope to one day live up to the full potential of our own personal constitution if we choose to write down today what we will be throughout our lives’ adventures.