Here’s what I know: there are at least five BIG reasons the best-of-the-best get stuck. I introduced the first one here. This second reason is closely related and it’s this:

#2. You are blaming other people and circumstances, refusing to take responsibility.

The hardest part about taking responsibility is that the places we get stuck are not always due to our own action or inaction. It is often others who make poor decisions, won’t make up their minds, change their minds, or fail to follow through on commitments that puts us in the place of stuck.

But taking responsibility means owning the fact that we are always “able to make a response". Staying the place of blame and waiting for others to act will get you nowhere. Deciding to make the response of moving forward can take you anywhere!

Jesus told a story called The Parable of the Wheat and the Tares: 

“The kingdom of heaven is like a man who sowed good seed in his field; but while men slept, his enemy came and sowed tares among the wheat and went his way. But when the grain had sprouted and produced a crop, then the tares also appeared. 

So the servants of the owner came and said to him, ‘Sir, did you not sow good seed in your field? How then does it have tares?’ 

He said to them, ‘An enemy has done this.’ The servants said to him, ‘Do you want us then to go and gather them up?’ 

But he said, ‘No, lest while you gather up the tares you also uproot the wheat with them. Let both grow together until the harvest, and at the time of harvest I will say to the reapers, “First gather together the tares and bind them in bundles to burn them, but gather the wheat into my barn.” ’ ” Matthew 13:24-30

While the Bible is consistent and never contradicts itself, there are a number of paradoxes in the Bible and this is one of them. A paradox is defined as, “a statement that seems self-contradictory or absurd but in reality expresses a possible truth”. On the surface, two Bible verses or stories may seem to contradict each other but when you take a deeper look they reveal a profound truth. 

We know that it is challenging to move forward in life without reflecting on how people in our past have sown bad seed in our lives. But here’s the paradox: if all you do is worry about the bad seed and never stop trying to pull it up, you can’t move forward. 

We are citizens of the Kingdom of Heaven. The Kingdom of Heaven is the realm opposite the world’s system. It is the realm where God is King and everything He has is available to us. This is why the Bible says we are in the world but not of it (John 17:14). We are not subject to the laws of the world’s system if we use our freewill to be subject to the laws of the Kingdom of Heaven. 

This is why Jesus starts so many of His parables with, “The Kingdom of Heaven is like…”. He isn’t necessarily talking about the afterlife. In fact, He was rarely talking about the afterlife. He was trying to teach us what living in the Kingdom realm could look like for us. 

When it comes to healing the tares in our lives (bad seed sown by others) we would do better to tend to the good seed in our lives. We should put more focus and emphasis on watering the truth about the Kingdom we live in rather than the truth the world lives in.

The man in the parable sowed good seed in his heart by planting the truth of the Word of God. He watered it with his faith and trusted that the seed he planted would produce after its own kind. He probably planted the truth that God gives seed to the sower and rain in due season, and so God did. 

But when days and days of scorching hot sun tried to plant doubt and fear in his mind, the tares, he kept watering the truth. He kept thinking about rain, seeing rain in his mind, checking for signs of rain knowing that it was coming because God had promised it. He knew that regardless of what the world’s system was telling him, the Word of the Lord still stands!

And so it did. 

The rain came and the wheat grew. And the tares grew too. But eventually the bad seed did what bad seed always does–it revealed itself for what it was. The man didn’t keep fussing over the fact that someone had intentionally planted evil in his garden and tried to set him up for failure. He knew that if all he did was keep pulling up the past, his harvest would be uprooted as well and never have the chance to come to fruition. 

So what is the point? The point is that we need to discern when it's time to acknowledge that, yes someone tried to infiltrate our progress for the purpose of destroying our vision. But instead of watering that anger and frustration, we must put our sights back on the vision. If we let the vision grow and stop fussing about the past (or present) attacks, we will come to a dead-end. Stuck. Never getting what we wanted.

Love y’all so much!