Although I found the 7 Laws of Life Mission in the lives of the great men and women I studied, I was still amazed when I ran across this book and saw the same principles echoed by a modern-day author. I was ecstatic to discover that not only did he live the laws and principles discussed in The Mission Driven Life, but he has been out there for years sharing this message around the world!
This month I want you to read it for yourself and see these principles in action TODAY! I’m so excited to discuss his stories and thoughts in the Mission Driven Mom Mastermind FB Group this month. Please grab this book and start reading–then share all your insights with us in the group!
Check out our BOOK DISCUSSION on this book in The Mission Driven Mom Mastermind Facebook Group!
Full Transcript
I want to tell you about this super awesome book we just found. We were at the library and my husband grabbed this book, The Four Doors by Richard Paul Evans. I read it in one night, it’s pretty short, it’s a pretty easy read and I was absolutely blown away by all the similarities between this book and The Mission Driven Life.
I had never read it before or seen it before and there are several common themes and ideas that run through both the books. So I thought it would be super fun if we had an ongoing discussion about this book in the month of July. We’re not going to do any Facebook Lives during July because everybody is vacationing. If you’re in the Mission Driven Mom Mastermind Facebook group then this is the book that we’re all going to grab and we’re going to discuss it all month because that’s something that we can do on the road. It will also reinforce the laws and principles taught in The Mission Driven Life. It will be the topic of some really awesome conversations.
I highly recommend you get that book right away, compare it to The Mission Driven Life and get serious about your own mission journey. Richard Paul Evans says some things that are really insightful and awesome things that complement The Mission Driven Life.
I wanted to share a couple things out of this book with you to help you understand why it’s so awesome and why I want you to read it:
He’s at this book signing and a teacher comes up to him and hands him some money and says, “My students raised this money for your foundation.” (Just so you know, he had started a couple different foundations which I think is amazing. He does a lot of charity work.) Then she says to, “Will you please come and thank them and talk to them for a few minutes?” He knew he was going to be in the city for another day so he said, “Okay, that would be fine. I’d be happy to stop by the school and do that.”
Well, the school district had gotten word that he was coming and decided to bus students in from other schools. So when he showed up at the school, the whole entire auditorium was completely filled with hundreds of students. An administrator then walked up to him and said, “You’ve got an hour to speak to these youth.” Well, he had definitely not planned for this, he’s panicking and doesn’t have any idea what to say to them. He says, “As I frantically considered what I would say to this roomful of students, the idea came to me to share with them everything I wish I had known when I was their age and that’s precisely what I did for the next hour. I spoke from the heart and the teens sat in complete silence. About halfway through my talk, I noticed that some of the youth were crying. When I finished the students stood to applaud and then lined up to meet me. Some of them wanted to share with me their own stories and struggles and some of them just asked to be hugged.”
This one event turned into giving the same talk (he called it “The Talk”) over and over and over again to all different kinds of groups, all around the world for the next five years.
Eventually he sat down to turn it into a book. It is about life mission–he even calls it mission. He says that we all are called by God to do a mission and the four doors are kind of the symbolic things we need to walk through in order to be able to do mission. There’s a lot of common themes there.
I love it especially because in the introduction he explains how he was prepared for his own life mission. He says, “I’m a novelist. People think that I must read novels all the time but actually I don’t. I love reading biographies. After I’d read dozens of them I realized that in the lives of these great men and women, they always talked about feeling called by God and having this mission; that they had a purpose in life that they needed to accomplish for someone else.”
As you can imagine I was freaking out when I read that. I thought, “Oh My heavens, that’s exactly what happened to me! I read all these stories and these individuals really did have life mission.” Of course, Evans doesn’t teach the 7 Laws or share all the details that I shared in The Mission Driven Life, which gives more concrete direction to discovering life mission. But many of the principles and the ideas that he talks about really parallel my book because they are true principles. We run into those true principles every time we we search out truth.
He also tells some really awesome personal stories. He talks about his really, really difficult childhood. It will just break your heart. He talks about this incredible experience that he had when he was trying to get his first book out to bookstores. He was one of the first people to self-publish. He’s probably the most successful story of self-publishing in history. I don’t want to spoil those stories for you–especially the one where he’s at this convention and he’s trying to push out his book to the booksellers. But there’s a couple quotes from him that I’ll be putting up in the Facebook group. In fact, one of them I even have put up on my mirror. They are really inspiring to me.
I want you to have this book! It is SO worth buying. It’s not going to cost you much on Amazon. I want you to read it this month, come to the Facebook group and talk about what you’re learning from it. This is the kind of thing that we’re going to do when the MDM Academy launches in the fall. We’ll have discussions on great works regularly. So we’ll get a little foretaste of that this month.
At the beginning of the book, this is what he says about life mission–I just want you to hear it from another voice. There are many people that say it but he says it so beautifully. “I believe that the greatest thing that all humanity has in common is the desire to make their lives matter. In the last two decades, I have met thousands of people and heard many of their stories. Far too many are living what Thoreau termed “lives of quiet desperation.” They live far below their own potential for joy, accomplishment and power–caged in the prison’s of their own unknowing. The Four Doors is about how to live life joyfully with freedom, power and purpose. I have witnessed the powerful effect each of these doors carries in both my own life and the lives of those with whom I have shared this message.”
I’m super excited for us to read and discuss this book together. It is really valuable. It will inspire you and it will confirm what you’ve been learning about and what we’ve been talking about with life mission, in the Facebook group especially. It really parallels much of what I’ve said before, much of what’s in the book. If you don’t have my book yet please go to TheMissionDrivenMom.com and grab your copy of The Mission Driven Life. Please join the Facebook group if you’re not a member yet so we can discuss this book with you and get to know you as part of our community.
Remember, that as you live the 4 Foundational Laws of Life Mission you are preparing yourself for a great work that God has for you; that only you can accomplish. Take that challenge. Live those laws and become the person you were meant to be. Fulfill your own life mission.