Forward

While I was in Wisconsin we went to the church where Jeff and Nikki grew up. It is the churches 70th anniversary, so pastor Doug Shultz spoke about the past, present, and future. He was explaining how to move forward, and this is a small piece of what I learned.

The past is necessary in order to know where you have been. The past will tell you where you are now, as well as tell you where you are going. However, focusing on the past will keep you from moving forward. You spend all your time saying "that is how it should be", or "those were the good days", or "we should do this", or "we should do that". My point is that focusing on our past will only cause us to talk about the things we should be doing.

The present is important because the present is what we are doing right know. But much like focusing on the past, focusing on the present will also keep us from growing. There's a saying that says "a vision without a goal is wishful thinking", some put it this way "a vision without a strategic plan of action, is just wishful thinking". Focusing on the present is very similar. We will get stuck either praising, or criticizing where we are. But we will lack the the ability to understand where we should be. In this case it is a lot like having the goals without the vision, or shooting an arrow at a target while blindfolded.

The future is critical because it's the future that will become our present, and then turn into our past. While focusing on the future is better then the other two, it is still very dangerous because it can cause us to forget about the steps we must take to get to it. Which again, is like the vision without the goals. We know where we should be but we don't know how to get there.

It takes a knowledge of all three, past, present, and future, to know where we have been, where we are, where we need to be, and how we get there. The past supplies us with the knowledge of what has or has not worked. The present tells us what we are currently doing. And the future shows us where we are going. But it takes a knowledge of all three to understand the strategic planning it takes to get to where we are going.