If you’ve ever tried to push a car with no driver at the wheel, you already know the problems of being pushed.  There’s a reason that cars are towed from in front, rather than pushed from behind.  But more on that in a minute.

A summary of this post

I spent over 8 years using all my skills to to gain attention and validation for myself as a musician in a band.  This need for validation and attention served as my steering as I was pushed by the need to please people and the drive to accomplish great things.  I couldn’t even see God’s plan for my life because it didn’t involve the things that I thought would bring me the most attention. Once God healed the areas that caused me to be driven, and I learned to follow his leading, I was able to follow him along a path that brought me more fulfillment than I ever experienced while being driven and pushed.

Where He’s Led Me

Over the past 16 months, I’ve been creating blues guitar lessons and posting them on YouTube, and selling them to like-minded guitarists around the world.

As of this writing, these lessons have attracted over 2 million views on YouTube, and draw about 10,000 people a month to my website.  I get emails from people every day that would, and sometimes do, make a grown man shed a tear of joy.  Emails telling me about how someone picked up the guitar after 20 years and is finally playing the way they always wanted, or how a proud dad is watching his 6 year old son learning things he never thought possible.

Most of the skills I needed to accomplish this I had learned long before I ever started to use them this way.

Where I Was Driven

Being driven can make you do some crazy things.  The slightest bit of ’tilt’ in your wheels can cause you to veer off course, at the mercy of whatever drives you.

For the longest time, I thought I was going to be the next Stevie Ray Vaughan.  Not once did I stop to consider why.  I realize today that I had a massive need for validation.  My guitar playing skills were what I felt made me special, and I intended to prove it to the world.

My steering was off.

With such a void in my life, the constant push to please people, and the pressure to accomplish, I was pushed again and again, driven off course by the loneliness that ached at my very core.

I spent 10 years of my life starting bands, playing a few gigs, writing songs about stuff that only mattered to me, and constantly wondering when my ship was going to come in and rescue me from this life of obscurity that I was condemned to with all the ordinary people of the world.  I was destined for greatness, and all my skills were testament to that fact.

I made websites, advertisements, logos.  I converted a spare room or basement in every house I rented into a recording space for my ‘art’.  In 2001 I recorded a CD and played every instrument and sang everything myself.  By the time I had spent $2000 getting it finished, I realized that it sucked and over 900 of them still sit in boxes in my attic.

In 2005 I recorded another live CD of a concert I had been planning for 6 months.  The quality was mediocre at best, yet I sank another $2000 into getting another set of boxes full of CDs for my attic, again.

I prided myself on my songwriting skills.  I wrote complex songs that didn’t groove, and abandoned the music that I really loved. The strangest things is that I was taking songwriting cues from other songwriters who’s music I didn’t even really enjoy.

Being pushed to please people caused me to expend my time and energy on projects that I had not even consulted my wife about.  For many months, I had people coming into our house 2 or 3 times a week to record.  All because I felt a false sense of obligation to people that I loved, a slight misalignment in my steering that allowed me to be driven off the path that God would have had me on.

One day my wife asked me what my 5 year plan was, and I was brought face to face with the reality that I had no vision for my life.  I had no 5 year plan.  I was completely caught up in what I could do right now to make myself known to the world.

When I Stalled

It’s a vast oversimplification to say that I read some books and was fixed, but that’s how it started.  I learned some things about my faith that I hadn’t known before, and before you know it, I stopped caring about getting a record deal or getting famous.  I stopped feeling obligated to please people, or even to participate in most things I was doing.  I just wanted to stop.  So I did for a while.  And it felt good.

But that’s not where it ended.

The Pulling Begins

In October 21, 2007 I put up my first guitar lesson on YouTube, and in less than 4 months I was selling hundreds of lessons a month to people around the world.  I didn’t start with a plan, I had no agenda.  I actually felt like I could barely keep up with the growing success of the lessons.

Slowly I began to see myself being pulled along a path that I had never seen.  I had answered a simple question from God that night when he asked me “Why aren’t you putting guitar lessons on YouTube?”  I wasn’t driven to do it, I just did what I felt he had asked me to do.

As the lessons grew more and more successful, I tried to turn the steering wheel a couple times, but when you’re being pulled by a force stronger than your ability to turn the wheel, the pull straightens out your steering.  His leading kept me from getting bogged down in things that would only take me off course.  The vision of where he was leading me was so compelling that it caused me to stop putting my hands on the wheel and just trust the pull.

It was as if he was in control.

I’m not going to suggest that God is the only source of pulling.  Certainly people who don’t know God are pulled by great dreams of things to come.  But I truly believe that God’s pull is the one that will bring the most fulfillment in any person’s life.

But it’s hard to be led, when you’re still being driven.

Are you living to prove a point?  Are you waiting at the drop of a hat to tell someone about that thing that you care so deeply about?  If so, I’ve got some very bad news for you.  People probably don’t like hearing you talk about it.  It’s not you, it’s us.  It’s just how we’re made.

I’m not trying to bring anyone down, or anything like that, but my heart is for people to experience life to the fullest, and you simply can’t do that when you walk around with a millstone of knowledge that you’re waiting to drop around someone’s neck.

How do I know this?  Because I was once the point man, and sometimes still slip into that role.  Whatever I was going through at any given time, was my point, and it didn’t matter if what you were talking about had anything to do with it or not, you better believe it was coming up in conversation. 

Being a Christian only made this worse.  Now I had good reason to prove my points.  Beacuse I was doing God’s work, and trying to make people better.  Until I realized how broken I was.  Hurt, scared, terrified of not being heard. 

What kind of point can you try and prove when you realize that you’re whole life has been spent trying to gain people’s approval?  About the only thing you want to do is shut up and not open your big fat mouth ever again.  This phase doesn’t last forever, but you can never again start dumping your point all over a perfectly good conversation in total innocence again.

When I started to learn what it really meant to experience complete validation and really know what the love of God feels like, I stopped caring about proving points to people.  I just wanted them to experience the same thing.  That can turn into a point to prove in and of itself, but part of that whole experience is learning that people can not be bullied into experiencing true validation. 

Are you living to prove a point?  If so, it’s possible that you’re not really doing either.

There would be other times when she would ask a question, and for whatever reason I didn’t understand what she was asking. But instead of simply asking her to repeat it, my response to her seemed to say "What is wrong with you, why can’t you explain this?". Part of this stemmed from my frustration about not being able to understand what she’d be saying. Nevertheless, it is something I had to learn to stop doing because of how it affected her, but still,I did not understand why.

Then one day, in a split second, I had a revelation that rocked my world. The Holy Spirit showed me a vision of my wife as a little girl, growing up, completing high school, going to college, getting 3 degrees. Graduating with a Ph.D, doing awesome research, being confident in her abilities. Taking care of herself, and doing fine.

The he showed me her beginning to doubt herself. All of a sudden she’s not so sure she knows what she’s doing anymore. Even basic things like paying bills, and banking etc… She begins to wonder if she’s not that intelligent, and that causes her to second guess everything she does.

Now comes the fun part. At that moment, the Holy Spirit revealed to me that this is what my words were doing to Lori. A strong woman who had been doing just fine on her own, now in marriage beginning to doubt herself because of the way I treated her.

My heart was broken, but not from guilt, or shame. It was broken for her sake. I felt God speak to me and say

"How dare you speak to her in such a way, someone that I love so much."

This was not condemnation, it was correction. And I needed it. Lori needed my support, not my correction. She needed someone to praise her, not look at her with frustration. It broke my heart to think that someone who used to be confident in herself, would look inward and think "Maybe I don’t really know what I’m doing", because of something I said.

When we begin to understand how much God loves us, and we stop being so hard on ourselves, our hearts become soft enough to realize how much we’ve hurt other people. Things we couldn’t see before because we were afraid to look. This experience was painful, but I was ready to face it because I knew that God would not abandon me for having done something so hurtful. That’s a wonderful place to be.

Not because I was scared, not because I felt bad, but because I simply in that moment didn’t want to contribute to the possibility of getting cancer someday. As I left the store, I realized that this is the first time I’ve been leaning one way on a food issue, and upon a small nudge from the Holy Spirit, changed my mind simply because of what He told me.

What a strange feeling to be able to abandon something you want so quickly because He asks you to. In that moment, the will of Anthony Stauffer ceased to exist, and all I wanted was to do what He asked of me, regardless of how I felt about it. My desires would be to do what He required.

As soon as I reached the stairwell in my building, the spell was broken and I immediately went back to being impatient, and edgy as I followed someone up the stairs at a forth of my normal speed. But for a brief instant, I had a glimpse of how Jesus approached life. Simple obedience to the one He loved.

So if self-control is a fruit of the Spirit, what is this thing that I’ve always called self-control? This thing that I try to build out of my own strength? That thing that takes grit, determination, and resolve? Maybe it’s pride, maybe it’s guilt. In the end it doesn’t really matter. It’s not self-control because it’s not a fruit of the Spirit.

Fruits of the Spirit are things that result because of the Holy Spirit being inside me. So it would seem that my self-control has more to to with how in touch I am with the reality that the Holy Spirit really dwells in me, than with my own determination.

It’s amazing to me what kind of person I become when I spend some time in real worship, often by myself. As difficult as it is for me to be patient, joyful, kind, and gentle in normal life, those things seem to become my very nature during those times. The answer to a lack of self-control is not trying harder, it’s realizing that all the trying in the world won’t result in real self-control. Only communion with the Holy Spirit can yield the fruit of genuine self-control.

In a phrase: My self-control is worthless outside of his presence.