Launching the New 3% Club

Greetings!

This week we kicked off the first session of what I'll call the "New 3% Club." Knowing and fulfilling God's purpose for your life. The sound of that just didn't roll off the tongue, so apologies if I condense it to the former, but I promise you the latter will be at the heart of our time together.

Below are the two documents that I distributed on Sunday. Note that this week is a "buy" week and we'll not have a meeting in order to allow people to continue ministering at the Detention Center. I mentioned to the group Sunday that originally I'd looked at this as a 3 month commitment, but with the current schedule plan of taking off the first Sunday each month, we'll be meeting through November.

I hope by now everyone has started thinking about your personal goals for this time together. This series of meetings and the associated work that you do will change your life. The amount of change and success that you enjoy depends entirely up to you! During these weeks together, we'll begin developing a strong understanding of what God put inside of us. What are our gifts and talents? What are the most important things in our lives - our core values? And what would we like to do with those gifts, talents and values?

If that all seems a bit daunting, don't worry! We'll step through the process together and help each other along the way.

Note, if you know anyone else who had interest in getting involved with this, there is still time to do so. Please encourage them!

We're still awaiting the books to arrive, and I'll be in contact with you as soon as they become available. Hopefully SOON! I left a message with Pastor Ernie to see what he could find out about the order and expect a good report shortly!

I'll give you a few things to consider as we await the books, just to help start you thinking. The first chapter in the book Success is Not an Accident is entitled "Choose Success" and tells us that being successful in any area, requires us to make a decision. We must choose to be successful. To do that we must first understand and define what "success" means to us. Every one of us will have different thoughts and understanding of what success means. For one person it might be landing a good job at a local restaurant busing tables. For someone else it might be getting a promotion to a management position. For a third person it might be getting to the place financially that they can retire comfortably. The interesting thing is that what you consider successful today, will probably change as time goes on. Eventually we'll be working to develop long range goals in areas associated with your core values. This will allow you to see how a progression of smaller "successes" will lead to accomplishment of much bigger long term goals. Today getting that job at Denny's busing tables sounds great, being promoted in five years to a management position is wonderful, and eventually having enough financial resources to retire comfortably might be a good long term goal.

Newberry talks a lot about YOU taking responsibility for your choices - your past, your present, and your future. He tells us to eliminate excuses; to take them out of our vocabulary! He encourages each of us to become a doer - refuse to be a victim.

In the homework section he asks us to:


1. Write out your personal definitions of success and failure.
2. Draw a line down the center of a paper and on the left write down everything in your life that you can control. On the right, all the things you have no control over.
3. Write out 20 of your positive characteristics.
4. Write out 20 o your past accomplishments.
5. Write out 20 of your greatest blessings.
6. Write out 20 blessings you expect to be grateful for 9 years from now.
7. Describe your ideal day in detail, from the moment you wake up until you drift off to sleep. Include as many emotion-provoking details as possible.


Get started! We don't have the books yet, but let's make a decision for that to be the first excuse we eliminate from stopping us from knowing God's purpose and plan for us! AMEN!