By David Douglas

Church of God Cathedral

Yogi Berra, catcher for The New York Yankees in the late 1950s and early 1960s, had a flair for putting things in an unusual way.

He said, “If you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll end up someplace else.”

Yogi knew the need for a goal in your life — a goal that would provide a direction for life to focus on.

That is what a Christian carries daily in their life: a goal toward an expected end, a goal to live life in such a way that when the journey here ends that a forever life in Heaven is realized.

Goals are vital to accomplishment. It has been said that a man who fails to plan plans to fail. That is how important goals are.

Goals help us to reposition our journey after we run into roadblocks on our way. A GPS will often reposition because of road work or something else that causes a blockage or a major slowdown. We need to sometimes have spiritual, emotional and physical repositioning because of circumstances and situations that cause us to be blocked or overly slowed in our pursuit of the goal.

The goal of reaching Heaven requires building relationships that are vertical and horizontal. The vertical relationship with the Lord is impacted by the horizontal relationships with our fellows mankind (the opposite is true also).

The Bible encourages us to be at peace with everyone as much as lies within our ability. We do our part to bring about world peace by working on the area of the world that is ours.

What a wonderful world we live in if enough people pursued the goal of peace with God and then with mankind. The evolution of peace in our lives comes as we find peace with God then ourselves and then carrying over onto others.

The Bible speaks of loving your brother even as you love yourself, so that reminds us that we have the goal of the right relationship with ourselves. The goal is not narcissistic, but provides a point of reference for how things impact others.

The bad news is in our world, there are many problems that people are impacted by. The good news is these problems are not insurmountable if we all set the goal of doing our part to correct the wrong. A wrong allowed to go uncorrected leads to mistrust and mistrust leads to broken relationships.

Relationships are how goals are accomplished. We have often heard the proverb of walking a mile in another man’s shoes and the understanding of how to accomplish that only comes from relationships.

I want relationship with others in this community that will allow them to think good of my intentions when things that I do impact them. I also want to have the relationship so that they can come to me and help me get things right (to reposition myself).

May the goal of this community (us individually grouped together) be to bring peace to our world. Where we can find grace and love for each other.

David Douglas is the senior pastor at Church of God Cathedral located at 3313 Lexington Road. He has been senior pastor since September 2000.