Stand and be Counted, Part I: Are You Standing on the Sidelines of Your Own Life?

“Be sure you put your feet in the right place, then stand firm.” ~ Abraham Lincoln

Note: This is Part I of my three-part “Stand and be Counted” series.

If a statue were to be erected in your honor, what would it be sculpted to look like?

Would it stand nobly, squared shoulders, strong, facing the elements or would it be nervously slouched as though hiding in the shadows of taller monuments?

Would the statue be holding a pen, a ball, a child or lifting a fallen stranger from the ground? Or would it be clutching a TV remote and a bag of chips in its stony hand with the look of boredom dully etched onto its granite face?

What would be inscribed on its base? Would it say, “Here sat …” or “Here slept …” or “Here shrugged …”? Or would it instead proclaim “Here stood …”

What Do You Stand For?

What do you say, “No more!” to? Where do you draw a line in the sand of your life? What are you totally committed to? To what are you willing to dedicate your time and effort, heart and soul? For what are you ready to stand and be counted?

History is filled with pages of people giving everything they had for a cause much bigger than they were, devoting their lives to principles, holding to something higher than their own self-interest. And so we have the Gandhis and Mother Teresas and Martin Luther King Jrs and Nelson Mandelas of the world and countless others who stand or stood for something grand and noble.

“Until you know what you are willing to die for, you have not yet begun to live.” ~ Rabbi Noah Weinberg

Whether we heroically stand alone against evil or join a movement or whether we simply live everyday far away from the spotlight, but deep in the trenches of life, how we stand determines, in part, who we end up becoming. And who we are, deep at the core, determines if and when we stand.

So if you haven’t yet mustered the courage to stand and stand tall, standing up for what’s right, then perhaps by the end of this series of posts, you will be inspired to stretch your moral legs and pull yourself to a full upright position, the position, by the way, men and women were meant to live their lives.

This series of posts will deal with 7 areas of life where we may have spent too much time sitting on the sidelines, afraid to get off the bench.

Here’s the first …

Are you sitting on the sidelines of your own life?

Are you in your own game, or have you benched yourself indefinitely? Too many people never quite get out of their proverbial pajamas and get dressed for life.

They sleep too long and watch too much TV and hang out too often and spend too much time with social media and Youtube or playing computer games, observing life as though through a window as a Peeping Tom would observe people from behind the safety of a bush in the dark. They watch life more than live it.

They have no goals, no plans, no aspirations. They go nowhere because they never decide where to go. Some are lazy. Others fear failure or public ridicule. Some put off the hard things in life because they never learned to delay some immediate gratification for future greatness.

It’s Time To Stand And Be Counted

It’s your life. No one else will ever live it for you. It will be what you make of it. So get out of the bushes of life. Get out of bed and turn off the TV and get doing something. Anything.

“In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing, the next best thing is the wrong thing, and the worst thing you can do is nothing.” ~ Theodore Roosevelt

So pick up a book and learn something you didn’t know before. Pick up a musical instrument and start learning how to play it. Join a club. Volunteer at a hospital. Get outside and climb something or run somewhere or build something. Break a bad habit. Work to improve a character trait. Challenge a fear. Set some goals for yourself and start to be and do things you never thought possible.

Stand now and be counted among the living! Get up and truly come alive with passion and purpose, with meaning and direction, and start being what you were always meant to be …

… the master of your own destiny.

Your Turn

Please share your thoughts in the comments below and share this post with your friends and followers if you found it of value. It would mean a lot to me.

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