3 things about aha moments to consider for your life
Have you ever had an experience like a light bulb going off in your head? Suddenly you discover an illuminating solution to a problem you’ve been facing. Some people call it awareness, an epiphany or insight. C. S. Lewis refers to it as “surprised by joy.”
You’re in that zone when the pieces start to come together, ideas, prayers, information and counsel start to take structure in your head and in your heart. Things that didn’t make sense suddenly start to make sense.
The story of the prodigal son is a great illustration (Luke 15:11-31). Jesus tells a parable to remind us that He forgives. But without that aha moment in the pig pen, the prodigal son would not have turned back toward home. Scripture says the son started to think about what was going on back at his father’s house, and he came to his senses. That’s one of those aha moments that changed his life.
When was the last time you had an aha moment? Have you had an aha moment that changed your life?
Pay attention to aha moments.
Some of us stop at those moments, respond and pay attention to them. Some of us ignore them and move on.
The Old Testament story of Moses and the burning bush was a huge aha moment. He sees a bush that refused to be consumed by the flame. And because Moses turned to pay attention to what God was doing in that moment of his life, God spoke to him.
It makes me wonder, if he walked by the burning bush and said, “I’m too busy with the sheep over here to pay attention to the burning bush, would God have waited, delayed or maybe even gone to someone else? We don’t know. But Moses paid attention to that aha moment, and God did an amazing thing for all of history.
And then we have someone like Felix, the governor who had an encounter with Paul, and Paul shares the gospel with him (Acts 24:24-25). Felix sends Paul away, telling Paul he’ll talk to him later about it.
God gave Felix an aha moment right there. But he chose to ignore it and go in another direction.
How moments come to us
Aha moments can be in the simplicity of the stories we share with one another. And sometimes they’re more profound.
I grew up in a Christian home. We were active, not only as a Christian family in church, but also in ministry and reaching other people for Christ. Everyone assumed I was saved, but at 13, I had an aha moment. It must have been the Holy Spirit speaking to me saying, “Do you truly know me? Do you truly know who I am? Have you truly given your life to me?
In just the beginning of my teen years, I went to my dad and said, “I know we’re a Christian family, but I don’t know if I’ve ever made a personal commitment to Christ. Will you pray with me?” That aha moment changed my life.
I’ve had an aha moment and then I hesitated. Back in the 90s, a radio station we could purchase came to my attention. It was like God was saying, “Hey, I think this would be a really good opportunity for Family Life Radio. Because of my own hesitation, I ignored that aha moment. And all these years later, I keep looking back and saying, “Yes, we should have.”
But you can’t live in those “should haves” because they can drive you nuts and destroy your life, too.
Aha moments occur in every area of our life. They can be personal, professional. They can occur in our marriage, in your family. You can pay attention to them or ignore them, which can be damaging to your life.
The power of questions
Some questions are profound. There are 135 profound questions that Jesus asked. Jesus was a master at asking questions. He already knew the answers to those questions, but He asked them because he wanted His listeners to experience an aha moment.
Think about the answer to His questions.
- If you love only those who love you, what reward will that get you?
- By worrying can you add a single hour to this life?
- Why do you worry about your clothes?
- Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own?
- Why are you so afraid?
- Why do you entertain evil thoughts in your heart?
That’s just a few of the 135 or more questions Jesus asked in the New Testament. It should have responded with an aha moment in the life of those who were hearing it.
A question I asked in 2004 was, “Should we continue to be an organization with several individual radio stations doing their own thing, or should we be a network of radio stations doing the same thing?” That one question got me to thinking many hours about:
- Who are we as a ministry?
- What does God have for us?
- Where should we go?
- What’s next?
That process began a series of meetings, hours planning, prayer and working through transition, and it wasn’t easy. Why was it difficult? I really felt convinced in my heart that God gave us that aha moment to do some things differently.
As you look at these moments in your life, sometimes God will give you an aha moment that’s not going to make sense to other people. It takes time to understand what God is saying. It’s brought us to where we are today.
When I look at this generation of ministry, and I see what Evan and his team are doing – I’m getting a chance to look in from a new perspective. God is giving to him his own aha moments. It’s powerful.
It’s listening to the aha moments in your personal life that makes the biggest difference. When God speaks to you in a quiet moment, you want to stop and pay attention to it. Do you allow God to use those moments?
All things – good and bad — start with
someone having an aha moment.
- Henry Ford had an aha moment to put a car in every garage.
- Bill Gates came along years later and had an aha moment to put a computer on every desk. Now, that makes sense today. But if you go back in history, that didn’t make a lot of sense at that time. All we had were giant IBM machines in the workplace. But Gates had a vision that it was possible.
- Our founding fathers – what an aha moment those 56 men must have had when they wrote the Declaration of Independence.
A man, listening to the Intentional Living program, called in and shared a testimony. In fact, we just aired it recently. He said, “You were talking about the importance of being faithful in your marriage, and I’m just about to start an affair with a woman. It was like a light bulb went off in my head that my wife and family don’t deserve that. They’ve done nothing wrong. I’m about to move into something that could destroy my life, my marriage and my family. Thank you.”
Be very careful about the source of your aha moment.
Satan can also give you an aha moment. It can seem very real and right in your life. Scripture says, test every spirit (1 Corinthians 12:10). Sometimes we hear stupid things that are not from God at all.
When you think about having an aha moment that you’re going to respond to or react to, make sure the source is coming from the Holy Spirit.
- Does it come from your experiences in life or from knowledge?
- Does it come from those you receive good counsel from, people you trust for reading Scripture and time in prayer?
- It’s vital to know the source is truly of God and not coming from another source that’s destructive.
Look back at the story of the prodigal son. After he squandered his entire inheritance on wild living, the son hired himself out to a citizen who sent him into the fields to feed the swine. And the son would have gladly filled his stomach with the pods that the swine ate, but no one gave him anything.
But when he came to his senses, he remembered his father’s hired servants have bread enough to spare and he is dying of hunger. He decides to go to his father and ask for forgiveness. He thought even if his father treated him like one of the hired servants, at least he wouldn’t go hungry.
3 things about aha moments to consider for your life
Three things that happened within his aha moment that you can apply to your life when aha moments happen to you.
- An aha moment could often be preceded by an oh no moment.
Wisdom would say to see the oh no moment two miles down the road. If you’re aware it is coming at you, you have an opportunity. Unfortunately, many people, when they have one of these destructive oh no moments, instead of coming to their senses, they keep digging the hole deeper and bigger. They keep thinking, If I continue with what I’m doing, but do it faster, things will get better.
2. An aha moment can bring clarity.
In the case of this prodigal son, when he woke up sleeping with the pigs, it was a clarifying moment of insight and truth in the reality of his life. Sometimes you just have to have a moment of reality.
The question to ask yourself is, If I continue doing what I’m doing now, where will I be in a year, two years, or five years from now?
3. Choose to act with humility and wisdom.
The prodigal son returned to his father humbly, expecting maybe just to be a hired hand. He didn’t come back with excuses, reasons or rationale. He came back humbly and said basically, I blew it.
Like Jesus, the father embraces him and welcomes him back into the family. That’s a beautiful picture of how God works. It’s not the way the world always works. It gives us an example of how we should respond to an aha moment.
Have a reality check!
And allow the Holy Spirit, through those experiences, to teach you to say, “What should I do?” “How should I respond to this aha moment?”
- Felix, as I mentioned, had an aha moment with Paul. He walked away, and we never hear the rest of that story. We just assume he rejected God, Jesus and salvation and paid the consequences for it.
- On the other hand, Paul had an aha moment on the Damascus Road, and he turned and gave his life to Christ. It changed the whole course of his life.
In a lifetime, we probably each have a handful of significant moments. As you move through your life and God gives you an aha moment, don’t blow it off. Stop and think about what it is God is teaching you.
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