In Pursuit of Excellence 2

I am sure we all had an exciting and thrilling Easter holiday. In keeping with my promise, I will be concluding this series today and I hope it won't need a part 3. I sincerely hope so. I recommend you read "In Pursuit of Excellence 1" if you are new to this series. In part 1 we saw a few things about the first "H" which is the Heart and how it comes to play in our pursuit of excellence. Statements like "follow your heart" or "follow your passion" goes to show how important it is in our pursuit of excellence because therein lies the secret of true success. Now lets move on to the other Hs-head and hands.

2) Head
The Head speaks of the Mind - the intellect, the imagination, the reasoning and thinking faculties.
It is one thing to know what you want and be passionate about it and quite another thing to know how to get it. This is where the head comes in. The heart may be fully in it but it takes the head to fine tune and refine the process. Your passion and desire fuels you but your head provides the road map. To be passionate about a cause and yet refuse to learn the nitty gritty or rudiments of it is actually to practice folly. In fact true passion makes you hungry to know more. It is passion (desire) that drives your quest for knowledge. Proverbs 18:1 "Through desire a man, having separated himself seeketh and intermeddleth with all wisdom". There is a better way of doing that thing you do currently, seek it out. For "...I show unto you a more excellent way" I Corinthians 12:31b. Go for knowledge, go for information. Knowledge makes your journey shorter. Get educated, enlightened and informed about that stuff for which you pursue excellence. A story was told of Soichiro Honda, founder of Honda Motor co. He has been passionate about automobiles right from childhood and actually set out in pursuit of his passion. The story had it that he had great difficulties making marketable pistons. He lacked the requisite knowledge to do this and his competitors were not willing to oblige him either. Fueled by passion, he went back to school and took up a course in production. He attended only classes that deal with production and as a result his academic performance was very poor. Worried by his poor performance, the coordinator of the college called him to find out what the problem was. You know what Honda told him? Honda tried to explain to the coordinator that he was not there for the certificate but for the knowledge of production. He was eventually kicked out of school but he went home armed with the knowledge of how to make marketable pistons. That is when passion meets knowledge.

The heart may be fully in it but it takes the head to fine tune and refine the process.

Another aspect of the head that must be involved in your pursuit of excellence is the imagination. Romans 12: 2b admonishes us "...to be transformed by the renewing of our minds". There are those who are prisoners of their (negative) imaginations. Imaginations are deep rooted thoughts, mental images/pictures in the subconscious mind. They often influence and dictate the thought patterns of the conscious mind. Take it or leave it, your transformation has a lot to do with the quality of your imaginations (thought life). "For as a man thinketh so is he", the Bible tells us. You can't hold a picture of mediocrity in your head and expects excellence. Negative imaginations are strongholds and the scriptures in II Corinthians 10: 4 enjoins us to cast down every imagination that exalts themselves above the knowledge of God. Positively engage your imagination with thoughts, images and pictures of excellence. That's meditation! Let them saturate you on the inside and failure will be far from you. This practice is not a piece of cake, I must confess. The ability to hold a mental image or picture of that which you desire no matter the happenings around you is no mean task. But thank God we walk by faith and not by sight (II Corinthians 5:7).

Excellence is not for the mentally lazy. Engage your reasoning and thinking faculties in your pursuit of excellence. Sit down, and thoughtfully plan your ways. Fine, you know what you want but have you a plan of actions which if followed will deliver? That things ain't working out as expected, have you sat down to think it through?. I don't mean worrying about a problem. Rather be creative and innovative in your thinking. Do you know there are those who are paid to think through problems? Oyedepo once said that God gave us brains so He could have some rest. Use your head no be curse. Hope you know your hands (activities, works) can not be wiser than your head. What your hands do is a function of how intelligent you are upstairs.

Your hands can not be wiser than your head.

There is a lot to say on the head but time and space won't permit.

3) Hands
The hands speak of work and physical activities. Your work is your portrait and signature, so you better be serious about yours. Excellence does not respond to mere wishes but to hard work. Pay attention to your work-the finished product. Be sure of the quality before it goes on display. It's no crime to have an internal quality control system in place. Let men know you for something.
Be skillful and diligent about it. For the Bible warns in Proverbs 10:4 that "He becometh poor that dealeth with a slack hand: but the the hand of the diligent maketh rich".
"Seesth thou a man diligent in his business? he shall stand before kings; he shall not stand before mean men" Proverbs 22:29

The Bible say in Proverbs 13: 4, "The soul of the sluggard desireth, and hath nothing". Don't let that idea die in your head! Translate it into work with your hands. God promised to bless the works of our hands. It means we take delivery of HIS blessings through the works of our hands. So get to work!
Put your heart and head into your work. That is, while you are passionate about what you do, you are also creative and innovative in how you do it.

Your work is your portrait and signature

When God gives you a promise, He expects that you fully engage your 3-Hs in corporation with HIM: your heart MUST believe, your head MUST agree and your hands MUST labour.
If you know these things, blessed are you when you do them.

Selah!