My wife and I have a 16 month old. Being our first child, you can imagine the amount of advice we got as my wife was pregnant and we were getting closer to his due date. We got advice like…
Get as much sleep as you can now! You’ll need it later!
Don’t feed from a bottle, it’ll mess up their routine.
Don’t buy newborn clothes, they’ll only be in them for a little time.
We got all of that advice and more.
We took some of that advice and ignored some of the others. One of the things we listened to and took to heart was to not buy any newborn clothes or diapers. We figured that people would give us enough to last for the “short” time our son would be in them.
Our son was born 6 weeks premature.
He was reeeally small.
He didn’t start in newborn, he started in premature size diapers and clothing.
As we brought him home from the hospital a couple of weeks after his birth, we were scrambling to find clothes to fit his tiny body. We had to go to the store the night we brought him home to get preemie diapers.
The advice that we were given, while it may have been great advice to the people giving it, didn’t work for us. Our situation was different.
You are different than the people around you. One of the things we’ve tried to do, especially as young leaders, is take what works for someone else and apply it to us. So we take on what works for other people and claim it as our own. We’re left with an identity crisis. Instead of knowing who God made us to be, we try to become everyone around us.
Just because it seems to work well for them, doesn’t mean it will work well for us.
Be you. You are you. You aren’t them!
This is part three of a 5-part blog series for young leaders. To read the full series:
Part One
Part Two
Part Four
Part Five
Jonathan Pearson is a Pastor at Cornerstone Community Church. He is author of Next Up: 8 Shifts Great Young Leaders Make.
To read more about shifts great young leaders make, pick up Jonathan Pearson’s book here.
