Getting Started

Americans tend to get misty-eyed about natural wilderness areas. Most of us wish to protect these unspoiled areas that remind us of the beauty of God’s great nature.

While wilderness areas may be beautiful, even romantic, they can also be terribly hard and unforgiving places to live.

While we may enjoy driving through the great national parks of our country, not many of us would really like to live on a desert or in the forest for long.

Paved roads, electricity, plumbing, roofs that do not leak, schools, banks, gas stations – these may all be pretty mundane, but how many people would want to live without them?

What primary factor distinguishes “civilization” and the wilderness?  Purposeful and indiscriminate growth is the distinguishing factor.  In the wilderness, life just randomly continues.  Things grow where they will as long as they can. There is no purpose. There is no master plan. You make the best of things.

Food grows in the wilderness, but not where and when you want it. Farmers, on the other hand, grow food purposefully.

Many of life’s necessities and pleasures can be found somewhere in the wilderness. But only purposeful growth turns these wild things into the useful, enjoyable, and convenient features of the life that most of us want to live.

The same is true for your life of intentional integrity. Very often the difference between a wasted life and one of intentional integrity is purposeful growth.

You WILL grow. You WILL learn new skills. You WILL learn new perspectives. You WILL progress through life.

But this growth will not take you far unless you have a master plan, unless you put some structure in place. Without clear goals, your life will naturally grow into a wilderness.

You may wish to go back to the “Wheel of Life” and establish growth goals for each of those areas. MacAdam lays out a process for establishing growth goals in two major areas: your spiritual life and your career. These are the next steps for your PIIP.

Instructions

You may not feel like a very spiritually minded person. You may not be a religious person.

Nevertheless, every one of us has a spiritual life. In fact, much of your life’s activities grow out of your spiritual life. You can ignore this fact, but it remains true.

Now is your chance to think about it. Is your spiritual life a wilderness, or is there any purposeful growth taking place?

Write a paragraph or two describing how you and God could together take charge of your ongoing spiritual development.

1. When you have completed this project, save a copy for yourself and submit a copy to your instructor using the Assignment submission page.