Ken Boa Reflections Ministries

Dr. Ken Boa: We are launching a new topic, a new series. I wrote a book a couple of years ago called Recalibrate Your Life: Navigating Transitions with Purpose and Hope. We all go through transitions and we need to sometimes take an inventory of our life and our journey. Where have we come from? Why are we here? Where are we going?

I love the cover of the book because you have this kind of a treacherous journey. You can see the little red lines here, and it goes through Scylla and Charybdis and all this turmoil. It gets across the other side, and it's a little bit more peaceful. You’re getting across, and there’s a nice dolphin and a nice rainbow. You get into the country itself. What you’re doing is purpose and hope. That is the real theme that we’re dealing with here, having an understanding of what life is about.

It has 15 chapters. In addition to the 13 here, there’s an introduction and a conclusion. My job is to take you through a chapter a week, and that’s not easy to do. But what I want to talk about is perspective. What gives meaning to life? What does it mean to leave a godly legacy? Little minor points like this, numbering your days, how profound and powerful that can be, treasuring God and people, moving from career to calling. You never, as we’ve said before, retire from a calling. You may retire from a career, but not from your vocation, your calling. What does it mean to have a kind of a reboot, a redeployment, as it were, when we think about retirement, instead of having this wrong approach that I fear most people take to retirement where they fritter their best years away in the wrong pursuit?

From perspective, you know me, Mr. Alliterator, I’ve got perspective, purpose, and practice. The three Ps. Understanding and then discovering what is your unique purpose. It’s important for us, as we go through our journey, to revisit. What are the things that matter most? What are the things that I’ve gotten insight from? How do I learn from life? You want to be a student all your life and you want to get better and better as you go.

Speaking of that, then there’s the whole area of what God has given you: the stewardship of your time, your talent, treasure, truth, and relationships, and then living so that the best is yet to come. I’m just going to be pulling out some little bits and pieces here. I have the way I’m going to do this. I have these little red dots, and those red dots are the things I want to point out because I can’t possibly teach this chapter in the time we’ve got. But what I can do is pull out a few insights that I want to share in each of these chapters.

I’m praying that this would be a timing issue for all of you, that you need at this time of year, it’s a great time to begin. In fact, in our January reflections, we’re going to be talking about kicking off the new year and we need to recalibrate. Really, what we’re trying to do as we grow older, we prepare our handoff to the next generation. If we’re younger, we want to gain wisdom from people who are down the road from us. If we’re smart, it’ll be a trans-generational sharing of sagacity.

What is sagacity? To be a sage, to be a person who has qualities of Christ-likeness that seem to be practical and hard-earned because you see it’s not just living and learning, but it’s learning and living. You have to do both. It's a person who learns from one's experiences and mistakes and gains wisdom from that. God is always seeking to transfer our hope and affections from the temporal to the eternal. That’s what recalibration really looks like.

Times of change, times of transition, and even more importantly, our response to them, are going to have a dramatic impact on the course of our journey. The landscape of our lives can be changing. There are some things that are experienced life transitions and some of them are samples: graduating from college or graduate school, getting married, moving, starting a new job, having a child, quitting your job to raise or help raise your kids or grandkids, marrying off your last child, retiring. Some of them are voluntary, like those.

Some of them are involuntary, stuff you didn’t put in your calendar, things like getting a divorce, emerging from an abusive relationship or other trauma, transitioning from military to civilian life, losing your job or facing some other career setback or disappointment, losing a loved one such as a parent, spouse, child, or sibling, getting notice from your company that you’re being forced to retire, becoming a full-time caregiver to an ailing spouse or family member.

These pivotal times, whether forced against our will or things that we planned, are both critical moments that should be invitations to consciously process where we have been, where are we now, and where are we heading? That to me is very critical. My desire at the heart of this whole thing, because people who have taken the time to get back and get an assessment of my life, do a revisit, never regret doing so. It’s a way of learning, and the more we do this, the more skillful you become because life is a matter of gaining skill.

That’s what wisdom is. The wisdom literature is always about gaining wisdom and skill and insight. You remember how I’ve told you before that we learn far more from our setbacks and sorrows and sufferings than we ever learn from our successes, and that good decisions come from experience, and most of that comes from making bad decisions. The wisdom you’ve learned from the experience of making bad decisions actually can then be used to help you make better decisions next time around.

You gain acuity and skill and you never want to stop learning. As soon as you stop learning, you start dying. You wither. A lot of people, sadly, have retired and they fritter away, as I say, their best years. It’s a unique time where people live longer than they did before. They have more options than the previous generations had and they have greater wealth. Up until recently, it was going up and up. That’s changing for various reasons, but the point is we still have more possibilities and options than my grandfather ever could have dreamed of, and my father as well.

It’s amazing what you can do with these new options in a situation using these times to align our affections and thoughts with what God calls valuable. After all, the value of a thing is what God says it is. It’s what God reveals what that is. If you want to know what is to be treasured and what is to be held with a loose grip, scriptures make that very clear. Again, it tells us in Luke 16 that the things that are highly esteemed among men are despised in God's sight. They're worthless in God's sight. He tells this to the Pharisees.

The fact is you can spend your short time in this world pursuing toys, trinkets, and tinsel and ignore the actual gift, the infinite joy that God is calling us to pursue because you got all settled on the secondary, the temporary. The wise thing we do is to treat things according to their true value, which is to hold the temporal with a loose grip and to treasure and to cultivate an appetite and aspiration for that which is going to endure. That’s hard to do. It goes against the culture and it goes against the grain for us to treasure the unseen over the seen, the not-yet over the now. Wouldn’t you agree that’s hard?

But isn't that the nature of faith? What does it say in Hebrews 11:1? Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, which means you don't have them yet, the conviction of things not seen. For me to esteem those things which are not yet over those things which are visible and those things that are not tangible over those things that are, that takes risk. We have to align our affections and set our hope on that which endures and to channel our actions and motivation toward the unique purposes that God provides for us.

If you train yourself to become a student of your life and of the life that God’s given you and get a kind of a sacred history, a journal, and recall his encounters with you, you become a person who’s training yourself to become more astute and to recognize that the lessons of the past are to be gained and they’re not to be regretted, but they’re to be seen as lessons, often hard-earned, hard-learned. Those are severe mercies that sometimes God allows in your life. The most powerful moments of knowing Him and intimacy with Him is a result of the severe mercies of God that He takes things away from us to draw us ever closer to Himself.

We wonder what He’s doing. I’ve learned to stop asking the question "Why?". I figured that out because I can’t figure out what "Why" is on anything in the natural world. Why should I know of the spiritual world? Is it going to be easier? I can’t understand anything in the natural world. I finally figured that out. The best scholars are the ones who know enough to know how little they know. You become more aware of your exceeding ignorance and then you marvel at all that God’s got for us.

You stop asking why and you believe that there’s a person who ordered it, and there’s a direction and an end to which it’s all moving. God has appointed you and called you and anointed you. He has appointed you and anointed you. He has actually adopted you. He’s called you for a purpose even before time. It says before time began we were in His heart. That’s what gives you meaning. You’re not a random occurrence. You’re not an episode between two oblivions, but rather you are a person who is an agent who is going to move on into the next world, into the next reality.

That reality is going to be a resurrected world and a resurrected body. That’s really something I need to, as I’m getting older, think more about because I’m forced to do thinking about the next life more as a result of the adversities I’ve encountered than I ever was before. Those are severe mercies as well. To set my hope on that which endures, to channel my actions and motivations toward the unique purpose and opportunities because life becomes more of an adventure when you’re open to the promptings and the small graces of the Holy Spirit.

You can begin to train yourself to become more conscious of and, in fact, invite and evoke the Spirit of God to give you a sense of what is this event and how am I to treat it, how am I to handle that? Those are important components. We have a bunch of tools in this book. In fact, there are 18 of them that we have. Rooting your identity in Christ, guide to a personal recalibration retreat. What would it be like if you had one year to live? Creating a legacy journal or document, principles and values to live by, and other things of this sort. Several of these tools that are in the book pop up in various places.

One of the first tools is in this chapter, this introduction: rooting your identity in Christ. Why do I put that there? It’s obvious. If you don’t grasp who and whose you are, you’re going to be floundering in this world. A man will live out his understanding of his identity. Most people’s identity is defined incorrectly, as you well know. It’s defined by the world around us, by the culture, by the society, and you don’t have a secure basis at all if you base it on that. You and I have to grasp who and whose we are. That’s why you have to calibrate in order to recalibrate. Some people have never actually done it at all.

You need a "Who am I?", fundamental questions that we’ve talked about many times before when we think about this whole idea of meaning and so forth. These four questions: Where did I come from? It’s the question of meaning. Who am I? It’s the question of identity. Who gets to define you? Why am I here? It’s the question of purpose. Where am I going? It’s the question of hope.

In really going through these events, especially when you go through adversity, or it can also be a transition of a new thing that’s happened in your life that’s a good thing, either way, it’s an invitation to back off, get perspective, recalibrate, revisit these four truths in light of these things that have happened in your life. You are not an accident. You have meaning. You’re defined not by the world but by the word, that you have a purpose that God has given you and called you to fulfill and that you’re going to a context in which the best is yet to come.

I like to celebrate wonderful moments in my memory of great experiences I’ve had. I did it again last night, tried to do a little experiment. I learn about my wife every time I do this. What things come to your mind as things that were particularly meaningful to me? She summoned up one thing I hadn’t thought about in years. I totally forgot about it, then it all came back. It flooded my mind, and it was a special experience we had. The beauty of that experience, that gave her pleasure to even remember it, is that that is not an end in itself, but a hint to a better good to come.

Whatever you loved in that is a hint of new things that are going to be prepared for you that are beyond your capacity to know, that they’re going to be even better. You’re not going to be looking back with regret and disdain and say, "But I thought..." or "But you said..." It’s going to be better than you guessed. This is why I constantly emphasize the need for seeing that the best is not in the past as most people suppose. The best years of our lives, remember that film that came out in the 40s? Rather, the best is yet to come if we think about the fact that we haven’t seen anything yet.

The best you’ve ever known are in my mind can be leveraged so that I don’t live with remorse and regret, but I live with a growing anticipation. I’ve got to find creative ways to do it as I get older. I’m running out of time and it goes by faster because your perception of time increases as you well know, the older you get, the faster it goes by. All these are invitations as sojourners and aliens, wandering strangers, pilgrims, exiles, all these ideas, being a tenant in this world. How brief it is, this short life we live.

It’s good for us to revisit on a regular basis to do that. One of the ways I recalibrate is my identity affirmations. We’ve talked about many of these things, just this handful that we have here are powerful truths that go contrary to the world system. It’s important for us to see because it gives us, if the more I grasp and choose to believe these things are so of me, even though I don’t feel this way, my citizenship is in heaven, for example, from which I eagerly wait a savior who’s going to transform the body of our humble state into conformity to the body that he has even to subject all things to himself.

That is your citizen. You’re not a citizen of this world. You’re a pilgrim, a sojourner, a wayfarer, a wanderer, stranger. Then those interesting exile images, aliens, and to be a tenant. You don't own anything. Hold it with a loose grip, but you’re being prepared for an eternal home that’s going to be far beyond all comprehension in our minds now. Once again, I do this thought experiment. What will it be like when I’m there? My suspicion is that the things I will regret most will never be the pain I endured in this world, but rather when I didn’t actually obey Him, love Him enough, trust Him enough to do what He called me to do. That’ll be my regret more than anything else.

We won’t be defined by that though, because you go further up and further in. It’s God’s grace. If I’d only known, I would have actually chosen to milk this moment, this opportunity. Every day is a gift. Every day is a mini-life, isn’t it? How every day has its birth, its growth, its decay, and its death. Just as every year has its birth, growth, decay, and death. Just as every life has its birth, growth, decay, and death. Just as every nation has its birth, growth, decay, and death. Just as every civilization has all four. It’s a process we shouldn’t be surprised that those rhythms are there. To notice every day and to treat it as a mini-life is a smart way to live.

Asking the Spirit of God to give you new eyes and new perspective. The more you grasp your identity in Christ, the more secure you become, the less you have to prove, the more you approach relationships out of the overflow of life in Him rather than out of deficiency, to approach relationships as vehicles to get your needs met. Rather you can become other-centered. Without God, recalibration is a dead end, an exercise in futility, boiling down to self-improvement.

Clearly, I’m not just saying that this will work unless it’s Christo-centric, it’s theo-centric. It has to be built around the one who made us and for whom all things come. It’s one of the things that bothers me about hymnody in the last century or two is that it gets more and more anthropocentric and not theo-centric. It’s much more about us and our experiences than it is about Him. I think we do well to remember who it is that life is about, rather than emphasizing our experiences. It’s to find our identity in Him and then knowing that that’s your identity, that’s your dignity, and that’s who you are.

Your life is hidden with Christ in God. Then you have a great glorious hope and future that God’s prepared for you. Otherwise, recalibration would just be an exercise in futility. But you see, we’re recalibrating to maintain or regain an eternal, Christ-centered perspective and to apply that Christ-empowered perspective in every component of our lives. It affects us all across the board here. These various tools that we use are designed to help us focus less and less on what’s passing away.

The world is passing away and also its lusts, but the one who does the will of God abides forever. There’s a role of suffering that we mention in this is all just in the beginning of the book just to give an understanding. But every transition that we go through are a loss of some kind as life as it once was. Our two sons are about to get married, reflects one father. We’ve been preparing them for this. This has always been our goal: to launch them. Yet even as he and his wife are excited for this next stage, perceiving God’s plan unfold in their sons’ lives, the excitement is tinged with grief. Life will never be the same again, he says.

There is an element of sadness alongside the happiness. Life is this way. My view is that your longings, your desires, your aspirations are really hints of better goods to come, hints of home that will be so extremely wonderful that when you look back, you’ll realize, "Oh, if I could have only known." I believe though that there’s in a fallen world, even there’s a kind of a mixture of those things that we want and those things that hurt us and we know that what that’s like and suffering is a vehicle that God uses. We’re rooted in an unchanging character, not in our circumstances.

That’s where recalibration comes in, that you and I have been called to be men of character, a consistency, who are not defined by the external circumstances but by the internals, the eternal. That you have something inside of you, your life is hidden with Christ in God. There’s a quality about you, and this is what I’m praying for each one of you men who are here, that you would have a quality about you that the Spirit of God would give you as you walk in the Spirit that demands an explanation.

Something about you that cannot just be written off. There’s a quality. What makes you able to hold up rather than fold up? What makes you so willing to serve other people or to give them attention and not to always have to be about you, but rather more and more realizing that every day, I die daily and Christ grows? As He increases, I decrease. He must increase and we must decrease. But the beauty in as you know in that irony is that as you decrease then you really find your true self. You never find it by trying to find it, you find it by losing it.

This unchanging character of God, not my circumstances, is what really anchors my soul. Therefore, one of my favorite verses, you’ve seen this so many times, 2 Corinthians 4:16-18 often comes to my mind as a text that I will chew on and sometimes summon up several times in the course of a day. By the way, when the Spirit of God gives you a particular text of scripture, regard that as an invitation, maybe write it down or choose to chew on it.

Be creative, don’t get yourself in a rut. People do this all the time. But rather the Spirit of God is far more creative and wants us to find new ways of expressing and experiencing this life and there’s all kinds of ways of doing that. Surprising things and the encounters that God gives you, many things will be these Kairos moments will be there. But we’ll continue on to talk about that in just a moment. It’s not so much the circumstances of our pain, but our response to that pain, as we’ve said so many times before, that matters. Pain and suffering and adversity and affliction and sorrows and setbacks are not options. After you’ve suffered for a little while, not if, you will suffer.

It’s not what happens to you, it’s what you do with what happens. This perspective that we have, of what do we gain from that and do we learn for that pain, don’t want to waste it. We’ve talked so many times about Kairos and Chronos, but I want to add another dimension to that. Remember we’ve talked about Chronos as your calendar time, clock time. You can put it in your planner. You can never plan God’s timing because God interrupts us.

Remember the training to learn to grasp, it’s not an interruption, what is it? Invitation, yeah. It’s not an interruption. But I have to say I have to empty myself of my agenda before I’m going to regard this as something that should be welcomed even though it was not convenient at the time. Most Kairos moments aren’t convenient. They come and grab us and the question is what do you do with it?

There’s this sort of a little mini-emptying, a kind of a death. You have to die to your own delusions about thinking you have God’s best interests at heart, thinking that you have your best interests at heart. He always wants better for you than you would choose for yourself. But the issue is I’ve got to submit to that. What I do in this Kairos recalibration is that’s when you’re being forced, whether you like it or not, to recalibrate. The circumstances have hit you.

My friend Archie Wannamaker was going to be with me today visiting and he’s in California because his sister seems to be on death’s door. That was a Kairos experience that he’s got to address. Each of these things come up and then you have to adjust accordingly. There’s Chronos recalibration as well when you can actually plan times of doing that. There’s Micro, Midi, and Macro.

We can recalibrate on a daily basis or weekly basis, those are micro recalibrations. We can do it on a monthly basis, a midi recalibration. At the beginning of the month, I try to do something where I kind of just turning the calendar, going to the next page, is like a symbolic act that I need to revisit and review. What I find myself, the macro are always at the end of the year and most of the best men do that. I’d advise you to make this a regular opportunity to take some time as the year winds down to reflect on what was the year like and where are you going to go with that.

Those are invitations. Well, those I call Chronos because I’m planning it, I’m putting it in my calendar to make it a process because I want to revisit my desires and objectives and so forth and make it a prayerful matter. There are ways of doing this. So I can actually schedule that kind of Chronos recalibration into my calendars. I can’t schedule Kairos. That’ll happen in His timing. But I’d better train myself to be open to the surprising prompts and works of the Spirit of God. You just do not know what’s going to happen.

Certain encounters will take place and yesterday was an example. I met this remarkable person, tremendous capacity and so forth. It was one of those unexpected things and some connections took place there that were very extraordinary. You just don’t know. Then I had a special meeting on Tuesday. All kinds of new things came out of the blue I didn’t plan on. You have to be open to those fresh surprises. I think it can be very helpful to do that.

Those recalibrations are very critical. Veering off course by one degree. When a ship is moving in the right direction but it's a little bit off, after time, that one degree becomes amplified. It may be imperceptible and you’re off course, but without a course correction, you’re going to get miles off course and you’ve got to right the ship, and then it’ll take more effort at that point. The short mini-adjustments are wise because it makes more sense for us to be doing this on a regular basis.

Wanting our lives to matter, at the heart of recalibrating is a deep desire to make your life count. You want to recognize that there’s a deep desire for God in us to persevere to the end, to press on and to hear those words, "Well done, good and faithful servant." I’d rather I want to hear those words rather than "You may come in." Many will hear "You may come in" because getting into His presence is by grace through faith, not by works.

But there’ll be many who will miss out on what could have been because they chose not to walk in obedience because they believed the lie that they knew better than God what their best interests looked like. I want to persevere, press on, to finish well to hear the "Well done" and I think my desire is for you as well that you would have that same desire because the failure to live and finish well doesn’t hurt us alone, it hurts others as well.

The people that know you and love you will be diminished if you do not pursue your calling. Your calling is going to affect other people whether you like it or not. You don’t have an option. You cannot sin in a vacuum. You cannot even sin without no one noticing the thing, but it’s going to affect something and it’s going to be there. It’s a remarkable thing that it begins to produce something that’s subtle and maybe not even known, but when there’s a compromise in your life, your heart is not united to fear His name.

His desire is for you to live clean and to live before Him so that it’s a kind of a way that it spills over and enhances and encourages rather than discourages other people. The last thing we end up with in this introduction is a guide to the second tool: a guide to a personal recalibration retreat. I try to do that, as I say, near the end of the year, half-day or one-day retreat. If you ever do that, and I strongly encourage you to make that the case, it might be a good idea to have an idea of what you might do that day.

We talk about what that looks like, how do you prepare for a one-day or half-day retreat. It’s right here in the book. We talk about leave electronics at home, turn them off, don’t check them except for an emergency, take a journal or notebook, just practical stuff. I’ve done this before on numerous occasions, never regret doing it because it forces you to revisit.

You have these four looks. You have this backward look and reflect on the story God’s written into your life and you have a whole life review and a one-year review. You can do that. There’s also the upward look, focusing on being in His presence. Then the inward look, so an honest self-assessment in light of that those two looks that you’ve just taken. Then the forward look: what do you want your life to look like as you move toward the future? You make those recalibrations.

So that’s where we are. We just finished the first chapter. But the essence of it is going to be in that, so I want to find this page for you that I think might be of value for you to reflect together on:

1. To align our affections and thoughts with what God calls valuable.

2. To set our hope on what endures.

3. To channel our actions and motivation toward the unique purpose and opportunity God places before you.

The more you’re aware of it, the more you will be aware and you’re going to realize life is full of these encounters if you notice it and respond to it.

One of the men in my group was talking about the idea of this exercise, this Tool Number 2: a guide to a personal recalibration retreat. The backward look and then there’s the upward look and the inward look and the forward look. But then he mentioned the idea of doing that in a group. I think it’s possible that a group of people are meeting and that would be an possibility. I’ve not done it with a group before, but I could see it as a possibility.

I want you to notice as well that there’s also a Kairos recalibration that you didn’t plan and that’s more focused than this other one. This other one you’re planning it and so you’re doing these questions, but the Kairos has to be focusing on the current situation, what’s going but you still take those looks. Try to figure out ways to make it where you can gain from your adversity and perspective on pain and so forth. What questions or experiences did you have that?

Guest (Male): If you could, you kind of talked about laying aside the past to be able to move forward. Could you speak to when Paul talks about that?

Dr. Ken Boa: Forgetting what lies behind and pressing on to what lies ahead? What is that because he says, "Not that I've already obtained this or already become perfect." He’s got a telos, he’s got an end, he’s got a purpose and that’s one of the things we’re talking about is what is the end for which I’m called. Forgetting what lies behind. What’s that phrase? "It’s okay to look back at the past, just don’t stare at it."

The idea "forgetting what lies behind" means that you’re really intending no longer to be defined by the past but by what’s going to be done that God’s going to do and bring it into redemption. It’s a creative modality rather than defining ourselves by the past. We’re actually being defined by the best is yet to come. How can I no longer be as I choose to not let that define me, forget what lies behind, but anticipate what’s coming ahead? It turns me from a negative dimension to an anticipatory consciousness.

Otherwise, I’m going to live with regret and remorse and that’s not what that’s intended to do. It’s intended to know, figure out what is good, what do you want more than anything else, and that’s a positive focusing on that. It’s really being a grace-filled person and living a grace-filled life because you realize we’re not getting what we deserve. The more we learn about life, the more we realize you don’t want to get what you deserve. Never ask for justice. Never ask for justice.

Asking for justice is a choice that he makes because he’s fixing his eyes on the goal rather than the past. Once again, it’s a future-oriented direction, but even the pain of the past can be redemptive and it can invite us to see how that can enhance what God is doing in me. So I’m being shaped by suffering once again. I’m focusing on the good that God’s going to bring out of it.

That’s the whole thing. Remember as I’ve said before on several occasions that Jesus never asks us to give up anything without promising a greater good in the end. He doesn’t say just give up your life and that’s it. He says, you lose your life, and what’s going to happen as a outcome of losing your life? You’re going to find it, His life for your life. He wires us for gain and profitability. There’s nothing wrong with that. We’re wired for gain and profitability, just don’t try to make that gain and profitability in this world. It’s not defined by that. It’s defined by what He’s preparing you for in your eternal citizenship. You’re in a soul-forming world, just a few decades, but gain those things which will never disappoint. That’s a vision of a life well lived.