In the back of our church’s sanctuary, near side door, live several row of bookshelves. Recently, we remodeled some of these shelves to become home to our Legacy Milestone resource center. Legacy Milestones is part of our church’s plan to partner with parents to help them disciple their children. The resource center is a place where parents, aunts, uncles and others that will be involved in this discipleship process can find books, CDs and other resources that will help them teach core competencies as families move from one milestone to the next.

But there is a bigger reason to have a resource center. An elephant sized reason.

Actually, it’s more to do with the rider of the elephant than the actual elephant.
In their book Switch, Chip and Dan Heath write about change, specifically, the things that make it hard for us to change our habits.

Chip and Dan use the analogy of a rider, and elephant and a path to describe the elements of choice. The rider is our logic, the elephant our emotions, and the path is, more or less, the environment. So, your rider is the one that wakes you up and encourages that early morning run, but the elephant is what keeps you in bed wanting to stay comfortable. An example of changing the path to help you get up would be to put the alarm clock across the room. One of the first things to grasp is that the rider has control over the elephant, but the elephant is MUCH bigger and can also do what it wants.
Discover more reasons for a Resource Center »