The Private Public Life

For many of us, we spend a lot of our energy fixated on the public life.
It makes sense. The public life feeds us. 

Here's the problem I have been coming to realize in my own life. 
If we don't feed our private life, eventually we will starve our public life.

We tend to think of it like this:
Feed the public life because that's what feeds us. The accolades, the credibility, the adrenaline rush, the platform, the empowerment of leaders ...... These are the things that drive us, that energize us. The private life, well, I will feed that in the margins of living and leading a public life.  Or so we think. 

It works for a while. 

Until you cross the threshold. There inevitably comes a point in your leadership continuum where you have starved your private life at the expense of feeding your public life. And once those lose balance and the scales begin to tip, it becomes increasingly more and more difficult to keep both from imploding. 

The best thing you can do?

Push pause on your public life. Every single chance you get. 

Feed your private life. Walk with Jesus. Daily. Love your wife and make her a priority. Daily. Invest in relationship with your kids. Daily. Practice the Sabbath religiously. 

Here's the sad truth I have seen in too many friends in ministry. 
They poured everything into the public life, into "ministry", all in the name of building the Kingdom of God. 

But when they reached their threshold moment, that point in time where the scales tipped, everything began to implode. Every thread in their life began to unravel. 

And the sad reality is this. 9 out 10 of them? When everything fell apart, they no longer had a family to rebuild with. They. Had. Lost. Everything. 

Character is built over an accumulation of small decisions over time. 

Credibility takes a lifetime to build. And it can be squandered away in an instant. 

So join me in doing ourselves, our families, and the family of God an favor. Let's be those that feed our private lives. 

Feed the private life and let the fullness that exists there be what sustains us in our public life of leadership. 

So the next time we are compelled to launch some new public endeavor, let's first ask ourselves if the principles and concepts are being lived out in our private lives. 

Maybe things need to exits in our private lives long before they make their way into our public arena. 

Think long and hard about it. If you don't, you will take on more than you are designed to carry, and will always be playing catch-up to implement it in the rhythms of your daily life.

Insecurity is bound to follow.  Those who neglect the private life eventually loose their grounding and live always looking over a shoulder, concerned what people think. Why? Because self-confidence and self-worth now come from a place that exists only on the surface and from the external.  

But if they flow out of your private walk with Jesus? 
That's what it means to be anchored. Your confidence and self worth are rooted and grounded from the core of who you are and the core of who your Creator says you are. 

Who you are in private is what you reproduce in public. It's NOT what you project in public that will become who you truly are.