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Calibration is adjusting one component or part of our lives, but alignment is getting all of the parts and relationships of our lives moving and working together with laser focus. Our purpose and calling must align with reality. Alignment is essential for our own effectiveness, right and positive influences, for properly pursuing our calling and purposes, and for living a joyful life. Organizational and team alignment is an important focus for accomplishing your mission.

Last week, in episode 025, we discussed the importance of alignment in our relationships and teams. In this episode of the Calibrate Life Podcast, David and Donna discuss how aligning with reality is necessary for the definition of our purpose and calling. We must calibrate every major area of our lives into alignment.

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Aligning Our Purpose and Calling with Reality

Alignment is about tracking together, moving in the same direction. Alignment personally, relationally, or organizationally requires alignment of our causes, objectives, vision, and purposes . While we are all uniquely and individually different, we will have different viewpoints and opinions, yet those unique viewpoints and opinions have to be aligned with common values, objectives and direction.

[shareable]We must calibrate every major area of our lives into alignment.[/shareable]

[2:40] This week we are working on the Calibrate360 model at a strategic retreat. We are working on how this life development pattern aligns with the bigger picture of our lives and calling. How can we align this matrix with the direction of our lives and the opportunity we have to make a transformational difference in people’s lives.

[5:55] As we’ve strategically worked through this matrix, we’ve recommitted to the calibration and alignment of these areas:

Our spiritual lives
Our passion
Our relationships
Our personal development
Our health and physical lives and
the directing and management of our resources

[8:33] We must Calibrate each of these areas regularly and we must keep them aligned with each other. As it relates to our mission and the living of joyful lives, we must consider the key areas in our lives and how they track together to fulfill our overall purpose and calling.

In episode 025 we discussed the alignment of our personal and team relationships. In this episode we are going to discuss the importance of alignment in staying on track with our purpose and calling.

[shareable]The degree to which we can align with someone is an indicator as to the degree to the movement we can achieve with them.[/shareable]

Alignment is essential for properly pursuing our calling and purposes. [9:45]

Alignment is more than just tracking with circumstances. Alignment is also about things that need to happen before we can make a move, before we can pursue something in our minds, hearts, or spirits.

We get a lot of great ideas, but unless we get alignment, we really cannot act upon those ideas. We have to have alignment. Just because we think something is a good idea, or because we think something is a God idea, we really still have to have alignment.

It has to align with the word of God,
it has to align with circumstances to at least some degree.
It has to align with what is happening in everyone else’s lives.

You know, there are times that we just move with what we feel God to be saying to us, even when it makes no sense, but we cannot move forward, or at least we should not move forward unless there is a measure of alignment.

[11:33] For instance, if I feel I am to pastor a church, but the church does not feel that way, there is not alignment. God has not aligned the circumstances to make what is in our heart possible. We may be diligent and even stubborn, and we may do everything that depends upon our own obedience and actions, but if we do not achieve DIVINE and SUPERNATURAL alignment, then we have to let it go. We may have been wrong, someone else may have been wrong. We may never know why, and we may feel that it was on some level and in some way the will of God, but if things did not line up to make it possible then we need to eventually let go of it.

Alignment is essential for right and positive influences. [15:44]

A couple of months ago I wrote about 8 Filters I Use to Determine the Content that Influences Me, some criteria I use to decide who I should listen to. I read and listen to some people who do not share my core values. I am not aligned with their life philosophies, their spiritual philosophies, their morals, of even their view of the measure of success. Why do I listen to them at all? Because they have information and insights I can gain from no other sources I’ve discovered.

Be extremely careful of where you gather your information and in what influences your life. I’ve felt a prompting and a warning many times in my spirit cautioning me to remember I am not aligned with some of the voices to which I listen.

I’ll mention no names, but when it comes to marketing and “success talk”, I must stay aligned with my values. Be cautious of influencers whose values are not aligned with yours. Even though you may never meet them, there is a yoking together of ideas and philosophies when you consume a lot of information from one person or source.

[18:47] Stay aligned with your values. When anything, any information, idea, or philosophy is out of alignment with your values, chew thoroughly and take care to spit out all the bones.

[shareable]When an idea or philosophy is out of alignment with your values, chew thoroughly and take care to spit out all the bones.[/shareable]

Alignment is essential for living a joyful life. [19:05]

See, here’s the thing… we think we have to understand everything, but we really don’t.
Losing someone you love in an untimely way causes you to seek for understanding. If there was just some way you could come to understand what had happened. If you could just assign some purpose to it, some reason, then you could find some peace.

[24:48] Father asked me to trust him. Father asked me to not seek understanding. He said I would never understand. He said I would never understand because it was beyond my understanding.

Let the peace of God that surpasses, that is beyond our understanding, let the peace of God rule your heart.
The peace of God goes beyond our understanding.
We do not have to understand to have peace.
We simply must trust God.

When circumstances do not align with what we want or would like to see, we have to accept that reality. We did not achieve alignment.

Stop trying to understand. It did not line up, maybe it will later, maybe someone else was disobedient, maybe you were disobedient, perhaps you misunderstood what God was saying to you. Without alignment you cannot move forward.

[26:50] There are layers of this.

For instance, sometimes alignment is desired, but not necessary. In those cases we can determine to move forward, the choice is ours.
In other cases, because key and critical components did not line up, we are unable to move forward.

When I consider the tug I sometimes feel to a particular situation, I look at the things misaligned with that desire. Those misaligned elements give me insight into what I should or should not do, they also give me insight into the true will of God.

[29:21] God is a master at alignment. He is awesome when it comes to alignment.

God can align the impossible. God can cause things to fall in place sovereignly and supernaturally. When things do not fall into place, and we are seeking purely the heart of God, it should send up a massive red flag. None of us are smart enough to be able to take a depth defying leap based upon our own understanding and our own discernment (as opposed to the discernment of the Holy Spirit) without alignment.

Alignment is often very simply confirmation.

[shareable]Alignment is often very simply confirmation.[/shareable]

This is not to say that simply because we do have alignment that we should move on something. Again, we need the discernment of the Holy Spirit. We need the witness of the plan of God.

Calibration Tools: Lifting Those You Love and Lead [30:47]

Consider a pending decision you need to make concerning a life direction. Evaluate the present alignment. Consider alignment with the Word of God, consider circumstantial and relational alignment. Where do you have convergence and where are you “off”? Can you overcome the misalignment, is it possible? Should you overcome the misalignment? Could the misalignment be a gift directing you in a different direction? [31:13]
Who are you listening to? Who influences you? Are you aligned with their worldview? Where do you differ in life and spiritual philosophies? How do those differences inform the degree to which you should embrace their counsel or influence? [32:00]
How do you handle it when your vision, your assumptions, or your desires do not align with reality? Can you recalibrate and align with your new reality? What realities must you accept to forge a new direction with which you can align? What realities can you or must you change to align with something which must be? Is it possible to change the reality, or is it a reality to which you have no choice but to surrender? [32:32]
Do you or can you trust God with the realities you cannot understand? [33:22]

Finally…[33:34]

So if I dissect this according to the word of the Lord and my life philosophical framework:
When we have alignment with the circumstances we must rely upon the discernment of the Holy Spirit to know if we should move forward.
When we do not have necessary alignment, then we rest in the peace that we cannot move forward.
When we lack total alignment, but we could still move forward, we must very carefully rely upon the divine direction of the Holy Spirit.
We should consider alignment as a sovereign exercise and gain insight from the degree of alignment.

Since We believe God divinely orchestrates our lives, I think that in situations where we have total outward alignment, we need to consider inward alignment. If inwardly we do not have the peace of God, we must consider that a very critical component of alignment.

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026 – Aligning Our Purpose with Reality