A Perfect Day

Monday Morning Blog: “The Fun Of Dreaming The Impossible Dream”

To subscribe call 415-333-1970

By Richard Gazowsky

 When I was a young man I used to dream about having the “perfect day”, and many times I almost achieved it.  But for some reason it would always be snatched from me at the last minute.  After years of experiencing this I began to lower my mental expectations and think that maybe a 20% success rate in a day would have to suffice as the equivalent of a perfect day.  For pretty much the main part of my adult life I have learned to rejoice, be happy, dance in internal ecstatic celebration at the small percentage of my day being perfectly equated to a whole day being perfect.  I figured this was also the norm for most of the successful people in the world.  

But two and a half years ago God poked a hole in the balloon of my apparent settled contentment and told me that I was, in reality, not reached perfection at all.  He expected me to have a perfect day every day!  What happened was, a Scripture began to run through my mind again and again:  “Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect.”  At first this Scripture completely frustrated my carnal mind, because I had negotiated a settlement with my conscience that it was impossible for me, as a human, to have absolutely perfect days.  And naturally, this mental barrier seemed completely insurmountable in my mind.

The reason I thought this way was because I was well aware of the human flaws that were constantly apparent in my life, and it was immensely frustrating for me to try to fix them.  But what totally hit me on my blind side was God’s command to just obey His voice, quit reasoning things out, become as a little child, and listen to Him.  Now I must admit that it has taken me years to come to this simple understanding.  I’ve had to go through numerous difficulties where God constantly showed me how useless my own understanding and calculations were.  Yet God was a perfect Gentleman in each lesson.  He showed me where I miscalculated my expected results, and if I would have just listened to His voice and done exactly what He’d said, it would have been perfect.

At some point in this journey God began to speak to me about an important lesson that is taught in the Bible about King Saul, and how King Saul’s life was such an example of the danger of disobedience.  I wrote in detail about this subject in my Monday Morning Blog, and I talked about how we could come to a place mentally where disobedience is so huge in our life it is like an elephant in the room ~ so big that we do not see it.  So it had been in my own life (which I also mentioned earlier), where dealing with the little disobedience in my life became so frustrating that the only way I could mentally handle it, and still maintain joy in my life, was to ignore it and let it become as invisible as the elephant in the room.  But God knew that it was possible for me to have a perfect day and He was willing to be patient and teach me how to get there.  Before I get to the main point of what now gives me a perfect day, let me explain to you the concept that I personally have about perfection.

To me the concept of perfection has a lot to do with doing activities that have meaningful and lasting results.  In other words, doing something that is going to be remembered.  At first, those in leadership around me set my goals in life.  Whatever seemed to please them also guided my decisions.  As I grew in authority, the responsibilities that influenced my daily life affected me in such a way that they caused me to often leave behind certain responsibilities that didn’t seem to me to have any importance.  Some of those responsibilities were simple ones, such as washing dishes, taking out the garbage, washing the car, and other menial tasks ~ because I was becoming important.  Then I began to run into a roadblock regarding this way of thinking because the more I tried to please the authorities around me, the more I ran into political walls.  I realized that the only way I could cross them meant that I would have to give up some of my personal integrity and sell myself to a belief system that might even offend God.

Suddenly I found myself in extreme difficulty in my personal prayer life with Jesus, because I became aware that the Lord was not happy with the compromises I had made.  Wow!  This put me into a whirlwind of pain, especially emotionally.  It was at this time that God began to speak to me (this was about 2 1/2 years ago) and say, “Richard, I am going to need to bring you and your family to perfection.  But the only way that I can do this is you must admit that everything that is wrong in your life is your fault.  When you do this it will daily begin to fix everything: first your family, then your church ~ even the city of San Francisco and beyond.”  Wow, these words were an incredible promise from God!  And all I had to do was to admit that everything that was wrong was my fault!  As I told you, I have been on this journey 2 1/2 years, and yes it is true that I’ve had to repeatedly admit in my mind and in my heart that things were my fault.  But I have discovered that Jesus has taken all of my blame and nailed it to Calvary.

The good news is though whenever I die to myself I literally leave an open womb in my heart to birth something fresh and new from the Father.  Jesus said the Son could do nothing unless He sees the Father do it.  I am learning that process in my own mind, that Richard should do nothing unless he first sees the Father do it.  Now what is amazing about this new equation of thinking is that I, as the leader of my family, church, and a responsible leader in the San Franciscan community, can do nothing to fix anything.  I realize I am totally helpless and must completely turn my authority as a father, pastor, and community leader over to God, and submit to what I see my Father doing. Wow!

It was this way of thinking that totally consumed my spirit at the beginning of January 2013.  At that point God began dropping new and fresh duties into my daily life.  Some of them were menial, tasks that I had previously never done around the house.  For example, God had me help my son take out the garbage and cut up the cardboard boxes before putting them into the recycling bin.  I even went and bought a special knife to slice the boxes into the most stackable space-saving form.  God then inspired me to help clean the dishes, a task my wife and daughters had taken care of for many years.  Suddenly God wanted me to start doing it, and in His instructions He talked to me about how the silverware is stacked in the drawer to make it look neat and be easily accessible.

Every time I finished my tasks around the house, God would begin to download new things to me in the Spirit that I was to do ~ things far beyond my previous capabilities.  He began to give me new inventions, and then introduce me to people that had the ability to bring these inventions into a prosperous reality.  This process of sowing and reaping (I am referring to sowing as being the simple obedience to God’s command, and reaping being the download of a new money-making project) has brought me to a whole new plateau of life experience that is fundamentally first class in every direction ~ and has the capabilities of perfection every day.  Wow!  This kind of supreme satisfaction is what I had dreamed about ever since I was young ~ but I had given up and settled for something less because I thought that such things were impossible to obtain, even for a Christian.

I have found now that a perfect day can be every single day of the rest of my life.  Last week I woke up, looked at my beautiful wife Sandy, and said, “Honey, I think for the first time in my life I have lived a perfect week where every day was just perfect!”  An intimate observer may not think that my life was actually that, but in my heart and according to the integrity of my spirit, I really was living that perfect dream life.  What was the thing that happened every day that gave me the assurance that I had reached my goal?

This is the seven million dollar answer:  Every day I received simple instructions from God after I saw the Father doing things in my life, and every day I put these simple instructions on my high priority list.  Every day I did those things, and everything else was placed on the second priority list ~ including the twenty-something personal projects that God had inspired me to work on.  Yes, each one of those projects could be a goldmine of opportunity and success for my life, my family’s life, my church’s life, and for those I have not even met yet.  Yet I put these priority tasks on my secondary option of importance.  My first choice of importance was God’s daily actions for me each day.  I believe this is what leads to a perfect day and a perfect life.

I advise you who are reading this blog, that if you are a leader with any type of responsibility it means that you will have to address all future plans with the statement, “If the Lord wills,” because the riskiest of activities I find myself doing is trying to plan the future.  That’s because it just doesn’t work with any degree of accuracy.  Even as I am writing this blog there is some stumbling about that I am doing regarding my own understanding, because “God’s ways are so far above my ways”.  The only thing I have control over is to obey His voice today.  And honestly, I do not know where God’s wind is blowing, where it came from, or where it is going.  I just know where it is right now. And so it is with those who are born of the Spirit.  If you will learn and live these kinds of exciting mysteries, I guarantee you, too, will live “A perfect day.”

This is a weekly email written by Richard Gazowsky, Pastor of A Place To Meet Jesus church in San Francisco. If you would like to opt-out from this weekly email, simply click on the SafeUnsubscribe link below.