My friend Doug Jones over at Perigrinatio has got me thinking about how I evaluate myself and the efforts of others. In my soul searching I have discovered that I am way too opinionated about things that are really nothing more than preferences or another, different way. I have always been an evaluator. Good or bad, for as long as I can remember I have looked at events, books, ideas, movies, sports teams, etc. through a critical lens. I am not sure why that is…it is sort of just in me.

In my role as director of Sonlife I have had to be about evaluation, critical thinking and constant assessment of our training, products and events for their impact and effectiveness. I have to be conscience of and practice healthy business fundamentals like supply and demand, financial sustainability, cost to benefit analysis, budget projections, staff productivity, etc. I am learning a bit as I go. Thank God I have a team and a board of directors to help me. I have no formal business training and I am a youth pastor as heart so I admit I have some major growth areas. However, when it comes to the efforts of others I am far to concerned with my opinion, what I would do different or what I could do to make something better. This is a problem for me.

We all need to be evaluated and sharpened in our leadership and methods and the truth is there is always room for improvement. I am not against helping myself or others move to the next level, but why do I seem to think that everything that I do is better than what everyone else is doing…?

Now, convictions are all together a different issue. The things I am convicted about I do because of God’s leading and the Spirits prompting. I understand that when I evaluate someone else’s or even my own ministry efforts that I need to do so through the lens of what I hold to be an unshakable truth. Again, that is different. I know the difference between the two — opinion and conviction — and yet for whatever the reason I always seem to blend the two together and pretend that they are one.

Let me give you and example. We (Sonlife) just finished two straight weeks of Merge, an event designed to help students merge their life with God’s story, his intended way of life and his mission to restore the world. It is a good event. Nearly the whole week I was in opinion/evaluation mode. I was looking for things that I would do differently and then communicating those things to people around me. Now, some of them were simple and logistical and in many ways related to those healthy business practices I mentioned above. Others of them, however, were related more to the effectiveness of other people serving in certain roles compared to myself or the way a room was set up or the song selection or the images behind the lyrics on the screen. These are not things I am convicted about. These are things I have different ideas and preferences about. You see my personal conundrum?

I need to be more concerned with who God is calling me to be and what I believe he is ordering me to be convicted about. The jealousy, cynicism, skepticism, arrogance and the need to be better or right have got to go.

Do you struggle with this? Do you find yourself being carried away from your calling and mission by “better ideas” or “other ways”? We need to help each other grow away from this type of thinking.