Pastor Freed used a quote from Yoda of Star Wars fame this morning in his blog, Jack’s Winning Words – “Difficult to see…Always in motion…Is the future.” (Yoda)
Freed talked about Yoda as a mentor, helping Luke Skywalker see and get to the future. He also discussed his own role mentoring others and about being mentored himself.
Do you have a mentor? Maybe you just have a role model – someone that you try to emulate because you see them as someone that you would like to be like. In our society, lots of young boys and girls take sports heroes as role models. Some may take movie or TV stars as role models or perhaps the characters that they play.
One technique that many successful sports stars use to “see” the future is called visualization. Golfers especially will focus on “seeing” the shot that they are about to hit in their imagination. They visualize the trajectory and the landing of the shot. They can “see” (they hope) how the ball will role on the green, once it gets there.
Many business coaches also teach visualization as a method of rehearsing for an upcoming meeting or presentation. They help you “see” how to handle the objections that may come up and visualize your success in the event, thus building confidence.
Visualization is not a bad technique to use to turn a dream or wish into a plan for success. Trying to visualize that success and the road to achieve it forces one to also “see” the challenges that must be overcome along the way to the goal and formulate plans for dealing with them. Sometimes that is where having a mentor come in the handiest, because they often can point out the challenges and recommend solutions, based upon their own experiences.
Much of the time in golf, and in life, the future plays out differently that one might have visualized. That is understandable, since we can only imagine (see) so much, and life is full of variables that escape our view. The fact that it doesn’t quite play out as we thought (hoped) it would doesn’t mean that the time spent visualizing a desired outcome was wasted. In fact, that time probably saved us from making many mistakes that we could have made and did put us in the right frame of mind for both success and for dealing with any setbacks.
Though we may not think to call on Him when we are visualizing about things in our day-to-day lives, we always have a mentor at hand in God. Whether you stop to ask yourself the question “What would Jesus do?” or just pause and think “what is the right things to do?”, the fact is that God is there to answer those questions and help you “see” the right thing to do. It won’t always be the most convenient or easiest things to do, but it will be the thing that leaves you feeling good about yourself at the end of the day.
Use God as your mentor each day. Ask for His help and advice each morning before you start out and visualize the events of your day playing out with God at your side. Then review the events of the day each night with God, remembering to ask for forgiveness for those instances where you made mistakes in judgement or actions. I suspect that, if you start doing that every day, you will also start to “see” a much better future – one that you can believe and achieve.
Another quote from Yoda seems appropriate to use in closing this post – “You fail because you don’t believe.”
See it…believe it…achieve it…
NormsMilfordBlog 
Mentors come and go. Some of them linger. We always need to be ready to learn when Yoda shows up.