Keep Learning

Excerpt from Imitation Is Suicide by Mark Batterson

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I think there is a such a temptation to copy when it comes to ministry. I wrestle with it as much as anyone else. I think we need models. I've got my fair share, including Erwin McManus. But I remember reading something Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in Self-Reliance: "There is a time in every man's education that he arrives at the conviction that imitation is suicide. He must take himself for better or for worse."

I think there are two simple principles that ought to guide us:

1) Keep Learning.
2) Be Yourself.

At some point, most of us stop learning and start copying. It's so much easier. We stop living out of right-brain imagination and start living out of left-brain memory. And that is when we stop creating the future and start repeating the past.

Just a simple reminder. There never has been and never will be anyone like you. And that isn't a testament to you. It's a testament to the God who created you.