reverse-engineering in 2008…intro

February 4, 2008

My wife and I have spent the entire month of January doing some soul searching.

The onslaught of the last six months - starting a new job, going to seminary, and having our fourth child - and the prospect of church planting in the near future has really forced us to take a hard look at what we want our and our children’s lives to look like. What is the legacy of the Andrews’ family going to be? Nine years in, we want to make sure the next, hopefully, 70 years will truly honor God and one another. It has been a time-consuming, daunting, and freeing experience all wrapped up into one…

The catalyst for this was a talk we heard a few years back by Mark Driscoll in which he described the process of what he called ‘reverse-engineering’ your life. ‘Reverse-engineering’ is a term Driscoll borrowed from a business friend to describe a process in which you choose a day as far in the future that you can reasonable plan toward—1 year, 2 years, 5 years. You ask questions to yourself, then define what/who you want to be on that day…then ‘reverse-engineer.’

We pored over Driscoll’s most most recent version of his talk at a 2007 Acts 29 boot camp. The notes from a previous talk on the same subject can be found here.

As we walked through the process, we found that the micro required most of our attention, but the macro was overarching impetus. Over the next week, I’m going to try to unpack and let you in ‘behind the curtain’ on more of the ‘micro’ of to encourage and maybe challenge you to think about what you can do right now to begin to reverse-engineer your life. In many ways, this will serve as an type of accountability for us…

Here are the areas we’ll look at:

1) Walk with God
2) Husband/Father
3) Schedule
4) Health
5) Finances
6) Work
7) Learning

Posted in family, fatherhood, parenting, relationships, reverse-engineering