Understanding your potential is essential in order for you to grow towards good and away from evil. It is vital to accurately understand the potential you have for good so that you endure what is necessary to actualize it. It is also vital to accurately understand the potential you have for evil so that you do what is necessary to fight it. You must accurately understand where you actually are in order to effectively value what good you have actuated and to make correct adjustments to improve yourself.
Your capacity to contribute to this world is a fundamental part of your joy. You ignore your potential at your own peril, with steep consequences that range across all aspects of this life and after.
Normal dogs were bred to be low-intelligence but affectionate companions. Sled dogs were bred to pull a burden for miles and miles every day. They are energetic and intelligent animals. When put into the situations they were designed for, sled dogs are happy and capable of deep bonds with humans. When you cage or confine a sled dog, depriving it of the duties it was born to do, it gets anxious, mean, and destructive. Like a sled dog, you were designed for abnormal tasks. Like a sled dog, you will be miserable if you do not live the purpose for which you were born.
Though you can run from your destiny, life has a way of helping it find you. In one instructive story, Jesus led Peter to walk out onto the water with him. Figuratively speaking, most Christians sit in a boat still sitting on the shore and claim they hold all the benefits God bestows to those who love him. Were you to pull their boat even into the shallows —as life always finds a way of doing—they would find everything that brings them peace in their simple situations to be insufficient for the chaos life provides. Meanwhile, those who actually believe God and follow him will find him taking them by the hand, leading them by foot on the water to the roughest seas. For them, there is no question of what God’s power is. Without it, they would instantly sink. They have no illusions about what God provides them in life, and they would never find themselves describing their lives as normal.
You were not created to be acted upon. You were created to act. Do not waste away the opportunities before you. You are a child of God. Do not squander your inheritance. Rise up and claim it! Do not ignore your potential. Do not delay your potential. Become who you were born to be.