As I sit here tonight, I feel so blessed!
Blessed when I saw my soaking wet boys holding our 2 dogs cause I knew everyone was safe.
Blessed when I saw all the city firefighters doing all they could to save what they could.
Blessed when I saw Keith Warren with extra clothes that night.
Blessed when I saw my brother and helping me jump my truck cause I forgot to take the keys out.
Blessed when Militza’s coworkers came by to check on her.
Blessed when one of the firefighters went in when we couldnt to grab my daughter’s instruments.
Blessed when the Red Cross came and handed us bags with necessities and a card so we could get some dry underwear that night.
Blessed when I put that dry underwear on along with dry clothes given to us earlier.
Blessed that I went to sleep and knew that everything would be allright. Can’t imagine most people would feel that, but my wife and I did.
Blessed when we woke up and got back to the house, there was already a team of people from FBC Crowley and several Crowley Eagle football players ready to get to work.
Blessed to see that there was some stuff salvageable, cause wasn’t sure there would be much the night before.
Blessed when coach Jeromy Flowers called and let me know that everyone was praying and the SCS moms lead by Dawn Holt and Amy Huchingson Taylor were already working to raise support.
Blessed when I found out there was already a go fund me set up by my wife’s good friend Dina for us.
Blessed when my dad who is sick got us masks, gloves, and trash bags to get started.
Blessed when an army of people including city workers started taking clothes to get washed.
Blessed by all the calls, texts, and facebook replies I’ve had over the last 2 days.
Blessed by all the drinks, table and chairs brought to our house for those working during cleanup.
Blessed to see Coach Flowers and his kids, Dawn Holt and one of my D-Line players during the day. Just seeing them lifted my spirits.
Blessed for all who have donated, either thru Go Fund Me or thru cash, checks, gift cards, the number of people who have donated is overwhelming!
Blessed to live in a community where organizations like First Baptist of Crowley, Infuzed Student Ministries, Calvary Baptist of Crowley, Southwest Christian School, Crowley Might Eagle Band, Crowley Football team, Crowley Lions Club, Hildebrant plumbing, The Catch Seafood, Crowley Tire and Auto, City of Crowley, Crowley Public Library, Crowley Rec Center, Crowley fire department have done so much for us already.
Blessed cause I know that so much has been done for us that I havent even been able to post about.
Blessed cause I know that God will direct our paths and deliver a new place to live.
Blessed cause we are loved.
Blessed cause of all of you!
Blessed cause God is our strength!
Just Blessed!
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Wilderness
I forgot I wrote this yesterday. I literally did just lose all my possessions to a house fire caused by a lightning strike last night. But I still feel blessed. My family is safe. We only lost things, things can be replaced.
2 hours before church last night, my dad asked me to give the message cause he is sick. I spoke at teen camp last week so he said to use that message. But it didnt feel right. I prayed and God gave me a message on why God has people go thru the wilderness. Since church got canceled the second I finished preparing, I wondered why that was laid on my heart. I now know it was just for me.
My family has been going thru a wilderness here lately. So much of are stuff has been breaking down, only 2 out of 5 cars are running, fridge is on the fritz, washing machine was acting up. And now most of those things are gone.
God has us in this wilderness for a reason. Everyone has them. It is part of the journey. I know we will get thru this. I’m positive what God has on the other side is so much better than we had and what we ever could have imagined.
The Power of Positive
In the fall of 2015, I had been let go from a high paying IT job. It was the 3rd time I had been laid off in 4 years and it was difficult to find work. I was trying to stay positive but that was really tough for me. Over and over, I kept hearing that I was overqualified for most of the jobs in which I was applying. After six months, creditors were constantly calling, vehicles were being repossessed, unemployment was running out, and we were about to lose our home. On top of that, my marriage was still rocky as we were trying to recover from the year before (that is a different story that I cover in a different blog post). But I was determined to get us out of this and put my life back together, I just didn’t know how to do it. I was praying every day for a good paying job so I could get back to the life I was accustomed to. But God wanted so much more for my life than a good paying job, and he revealed that through the Power of Positive Summit of 2016.
Since I could not find work, I qualified for funding to help me get back to college. I had started a degree in Sports and Health Sciences thinking I might get back into coaching. I had coached football and basketball part-time several years earlier and I had really missed it. I was taking a class and was doing a report about energy levels. Searching through the school’s online library, I came across Jon Gordon’s book, The Energy Bus. I had not heard of it and did not really know what it was about. I started reading it and although it didn’t really pertain to my paper, it quickly drew me in. The main character seemed a lot like me! I soon forgot about my paper and I stayed up all night reading this book. In The Energy Bus, Jon talks about fueling your life, work, and team with positive energy. I searched online about Jon Gordon, and I saw that he and Daniel Decker were about to start a Power of Positive Summit online. The best part was, it was free, which happened to be exactly all that I could afford. I signed up, not really sure what to expect. This positive thing was new to me even though I took a course from the Positive Coaching Alliance years earlier when I coached. But honestly, I never really bought into it.
So early April, the summit started. It had some awesome speakers: Yogi Roth, Joshua Medcalf, Andy Andrews. All giving me great messages and showing me what the power of positive mindset was. But one video really hit really stood out for me. Eric Metaxas talked about what being positive was for him. He told the story of the children of Israel crossing over the red sea. After they crossed safely on dry ground, and God delivered them from the Egyptian army, they thanked God and sang a song. Eric pointed out that they should have been thanking God and singing before they crossed! Right Song, wrong side! God had done so much for them already. I still have the quote I sent out on Twitter that night: This really hit home! “Be thankful in ALL circumstances. Trust. Believe.” – @ericmetaxas.
This is where everything really changed for me! I remember watching that video over and over and crying more each time I watched it. I opened my Bible and dived into Exodus and that story. It hit me like a ton of bricks, I saw how blessed I was and even though I was in a tough situation, I should be thankful for ALL that God has done for me. Even the trials! That is the night when I truly gave everything up to God. I let go, I surrendered everything to Him. I soon discovered that God needed to take away all those possessions because they had become a prison for me. He had better plans for me and I couldn’t get there with all that weighing me down.
I believe that Power of Positive Summit back in 2016 was done just for me. I truly believe that. I so needed that message right at that point in my life! This year, I am this summit’s biggest fan. My family and friends think I am a little crazy as much as I talk about it and promote it on social media. But I think there could be that one video that is life changing for them as well. So I will continue to promote it, like and share quotes, and sing its praises as much as I can. I don’t know if Jon Gordon will ever read this, but I want to thank him for putting this summit on. I have read most of his books and I now live my life with a positive mindset. I am getting so much from the videos this year and can’t wait every day to see what is next. If you are reading this and you have not signed up for this year’s summit, you still got time. The videos are usually just 5 to 10 minutes and they have such great content. If you want to learn about this positive movement, please check it out at http://PowerOfPositiveSummit.com, it could change your life like it changed mine!
Next Play
As a coach, I am always reminding players to focus on the next play. It is easy to say, harder to do. What separates the elite athletes from most, is they are able to put the past behind them. They focus on whats next. We call it having a short memory. Too many times, athletes can not do that. They do not let it go. They keep recalling that horrible play over and over in their head. They keep reliving it, which causes them to make more bad plays. It just snowballs.
Recently, Dez Bryant of the Dallas Cowboys had this happen to him. In a game they had to win, he dropped a simple pass, then he fumbled the ball. This lead him to sitting on the sideline with a defeated look for the remainder of the game. I do not mean to just pick on Dez, I know sports radio has done enough of that over the past few weeks. I just wanted to point out that even professional athletes do it, not just the high school athletes I coach.
But it is not just athletes, we do it in this game of life as well. Think about when you had a bad day, which turned into a bad week, a bad month, etc.. Or one bad decision that lead into another bad decision, then another, till you find yourself at rock bottom. Wondering how in the world did you sink so low. How did it get to this.
In sports, coaches stress fundamentals. If the player does what they are suppose to do, they have a better chance of making a positive play. When they get away from those techniques that they were taught, negative things usually happen. It is the same for us. I believe most of us know the fundamentals on how we should live our lives. We just do not execute like we should. We do not stop the negative momentum from building up. We need to pause and tell ourselves – Next Play. We can not change the past, there is nothing we can do about yesterday. We can only control the controllable’s. So as we learn from yesterday, let us make sure we focus on today. Not tomorrow. Just today! Focus on just this next play.
Recommit!
All of us have done this, we start something with the best intentions, but then we fall behind. Life sometimes happens to us. We get bombarded with things, we get distracted, we don’t do what we need to be doing. This could be working out, spending time with God, reading good books or even just writing on a blog. I’m obviously talking to myself here. When I started this, I said I was writing to myself. If anyone else reads it, gets something out of it, applies it, then that is a huge plus. I have fallen behind on my writing commitments that I have made to myself. I could go down the list of everything I have going on, but I know we make the time for the things that are important to us. This is football season and I am a football coach, so time is at a premium during the fall. But I still find time to watch football and Curb your Enthusiasm on TV. So I have some time, I just have to make better use of it.
The main message of my blog is to Commit, Surrender the results, and Trust the process. So I have to recommit to writing on this blog. I can not get better if I’m not doing it. I have to make sure this is a bigger priority in my life. Sometimes we need to let go of things that distract us from what we are supposed to be doing. Even if that means not watching as much football. So if you fall behind with something you know you are supposed to be doing, recommit to it. Make it a higher priority and carve out time to do the things you are supposed to. For me, that is to just keep hitting publish!
#CommitSurrenderTrust
Get Busy Growing
Shawshank Redemption is one of my favorite movies. It is always a stop-down for me. I always end up watching it if I see it while flipping channels. One of my favorite quotes from the movie is Andy saying “I guess it comes down to a simple choice, really. Get busy living or get busy dying.” I love the phrase at the beginning: “It comes down to a simple choice”. Really, our life comes down to the choices we make. One of the most important choices we can make in life, is to chose to grow.
Choosing to grow is the first step in adopting a growth mindset. I first learned about the growth mindset from Train to be Clutch’s Leadership Reading Program. The first book on the list is Mindset: The New Psychology of success by Carol Dweck. It taught me that there are two mindsets that we choose to live life with, either a growth or a fixed. The growth mindset is a starting point for change, the fixed mindset stands in the way of development and change. If I was going to get anything from the other books, I had to be open to choosing growth.
Much of my life, I lived in the fixed mindset on many things. I believed “You are who you are” and said that to my wife many times. A fixed mindset assumes that our character, intelligence, and creative ability are givens which we can’t really change. It wants success by avoiding failure at all costs. That means participating in events or classes, where you know you will be successful. I loved math and history because it was easy for me. I hated English, Literature, and writing because I wasn’t good at them. I didn’t give full effort in those classes, because I told myself: “What’s the point? I suck at them anyways.”
A growth mindset, on the other hand, thrives on challenges. It sees failure as not being stupid or unsuccessful, but as a way to learn and grow our existing abilities. If I would have had a growth mindset back in my writing class, I would have used those classes as a chance to improve, which would come in handy today. We all have things in our life that we struggle with doing. It could be math, grammar, spelling, cooking, taking tests, etc.. the list could go on and on. The growth mindset’s goal is to learn and improve in ALL areas of your life.
Even if society considers you the best at something, always look to get better. Grant Teaff, the former coach of the Baylor Bears, tells a story of coach Gordon Wood. Coach Wood was the nation’s winningest high school football coach at the time and had already won nine state football titles. Teaff went to watch film at his office the day after a Baylor game. Coach Wood was waiting for him on the couch in the team’s lounge. Wood saw Baylor do some things in the game the day before, he wanted to learn about them so he could help his team achieve even more success. He was at the end of his career, had nothing to prove to anyone, he just wanted to keep improving and gain even more knowledge.
There are many aspects to the growth mindset. The best way to learn about them all is by reading Carol Dweck’s book, Mindset. She also has a website at mindsetworks.com that I highly recommend you check out. No matter where you are in life, or what situation you are in, how old or how young, you have a choice everyday. A choice to use every failure, every setback as a chance to learn. A choice to improve yourself or just stay the same. A choice to get busy growing, or get busy dying.
Go Forward
I already had a plan for my next post, but at church on Sunday, we turned to a familiar passage in Exodus that I had highlighted a year before. It was Exodus 14:13 – 15. “Do not be afraid. Stand still, and see the salvation of the Lord, which He will accomplish for you today….The Lord will fight for you, and you shall hold your peace…Why do you cry to Me?…..Go Forward.”
The children of Israel were backed up to the Red Sea. They could see the Egyptians coming after them. They were cornered, between a rock and a hard place. Or more like between a deep sea, and a powerful Egyptian army. As soon as I saw the highlighted verses, a flood of memories came over me about my Red Sea.
I have coached football and basketball for awhile, but my main income has always come from doing computer work. My IT contract ended the year before and I was having trouble finding work. I firmly believe I didn’t find more IT work, cause that is not what I am supposed to be doing. We were completely out of money and were totally relying on God to provide food and pay bills (which He did!) One big bill was our rent payment, our landlord was great and worked with us. But we knew we were living in a house we could not afford. We worked out an agreement to be out of our house by Aug 1st. The problem was we had no place to move to. We had no money to pay the first months rent or even a security deposit. It felt like we were up against our Red Sea and the Egyptian army was closing fast.
During this time, God gave me two messages. The first was a video that talked about an old message titled “Right Song, Wrong Side.” After Israel crossed the Red Sea, they sang a song about Salvation of the Lord. Israel should have sang that song before the Red Sea was parted, not after they crossed. I was determined to sing God’s praises before cause I knew he would part our Red Sea. I then came upon Exodus 14 about a week before August 1st. Even though we were praying relentlessly about our job and living situation, we were not preparing ourselves to move. “Why do you cry to me?..Go Forward” felt like a personal message directly to me! In today’s words, I was reading, “I got this, Do what you need to do.” I got up, informed the family that I was not sure where we were going, but we needed to be packed and ready to move.
The Thursday before we had to be out, I was looking online for centers or services that could help us. I was making calls, sending emails but all told me that they couldn’t help till we were officially homeless. I needed to get back with them on Monday. While searching, I saw an ad for Catholic Charities. I went to their website and it suggested to go to their offices instead of calling. I figured they would tell me the same thing, but I got up and went to their location. They asked if I had ever served in the military, I told them I had. A very nice lady from their Veteran Affairs department came out and talked to me. I explained our situation and her first question to me was, “How are you not freaking out?” I chuckled and told her, “I just feel a peace that God is going to provide and take care of us.” She smiled and told me, “Well, God has led you to the right place”. She started listing all that they were going to do for my family. They supplied us with a moving truck, a large storage facility for all our stuff, and put my family in a hotel. She told me they would pay my deposit and rent till we got back on our feet. They would pay all our deposits on all our utilities and any thing that was needed to get us in a house. Now, I am not a guy who cries easily, but I couldn’t help myself as she was listing all this out. This was by far, more than we could have ever hoped for. I could barely get all this out when I called my wife as I left the building.
God brought us through that situation, just like he parted the Red Sea and had Israel cross over on dry land. The whole time, I just knew He was going to. I didn’t know how God was going to do it. But I knew He was. I can honestly say, I have never felt such peace through a crisis as I did with this. People who knew what was going on, couldn’t believe how calm my wife and I were about it. Everyone told us how they would be freaking out. It also didn’t take long for God to provide a house and the right job that still allowed me to coach. I used to have so much anxiety about my career, money, and all the things we fret over these days. But I now know that worrying is pointless. The words “Fear Not” are in the Bible more than 365 times. So you could read a different verse to “Fear Not” every day of the year. So remember, when you are up against your Red Sea, Remember who is in control! There is such a peace when you do.
Commit, Surrender and Trust!
It’s going to suck
“It’s going to suck so be glad that no one will read it” was a statement I remember most from my call with Joshua Medcalf yesterday. He is the founder of Train to be Clutch and author of several books, the latest being Pound the Stone. I told him I was wanting to start a blog, but I have been struggling with creating my first post and trying to make it as perfect as I could. I’ve thought about the name, the logo, what style to use, etc… I have been thinking about all my many plans and ideas I have for it. But, I wasn’t writing, which is what the whole point of a blog is in the first place. He told me it doesn’t matter if it sucks, it just matters that I start. So, here goes.
Commit, Surrender, and Trust – I remember when I first read those words from a quote in Chop Wood, Carry Water by Medcalf. They resonated with me. I got up out of bed to write them down. Commit to it, Surrender the outcome, and Trust in the process. I decided to name the blog with the first letters of those three words. They also have great meaning when it comes to a relationship with God. Commit your life to Him, Surrender your life to Him, And Trust Him in ALL things! It took me forty years to learn that but I am so glad I did. I used to worry about so many things: my job, money, and where I wanted to get to in life. But now, I have turned it all over to God and my life is soooooo much better for it.
I want to write about those three words a little more. First, Commit. Joshua made me commit to him yesterday that I would make my first post today, then on Mondays and Thursdays from now on. So, as you see it in writing here, I have committed to it. To commit is to fully dedicate yourself to something. To go ALL IN! What have you fully gone all in on before? Honestly, and sadly, I have struggled with fully committing to things in the past. As I live my life now, I want to be a man that fully commits! I’m so thankful that he made me commit to writing this post today. It’s what I needed to do, stop overthinking and just write!
Second is surrendering the outcome. This is something I have been working on in my life for a couple of years now. I tell my kids to do it all the time. Give your best and just surrender the outcome. Don’t worry about the end result, just give your best and the results will take care of themselves. So yesterday, as Joshua is telling me that, it is like someone slapping me in the face, cause I know it! But I wasn’t applying it!
And last, Trust. Trust in the process of making yourself better. Trust in your training. I trust that my 500th blog post will be better than this one cause I am going to work at it and master my craft. Trust that everything that happens to you in your life is in your best interest. Now, that is tough to do. Very tough. But if you feel God is in control, then you must trust in Him in ALL things. Not just when you are employed, or healthy. Proverbs says to Trust the Lord with ALL your heart. So Trust when you are unemployed, when your marriage is on the rocks, or even when you lose a loved one. God will carry you thru it.
I’ve been on a major transformation these last two years. God has been working in my life and showing me the right way to live. I believe God has used the works of men like Joshua Medcalf, Jamie Gilbert, Mark Batterson and Jon Gordon to help change my life. Besides reading the Bible, I highly encourage you to find their books and materials. Joshua told me yesterday, there are many that he won’t be able to reach that maybe I will. So that is why I have started this blog. Maybe someday down the road, my bog posts won’t suck anymore and maybe I will be able to reach someone like they reached me.
Metz Coaching 