If you could snap your fingers and become who you'd always wanted to be, would you snap your fingers?

​While walking last night, I was listening to a podcast conversation between two men I've really come to appreciate - Dr. Rangan Chaterjee and Rich Roll. During this conversation, Roll said the following:

"Even if you were given the opportunity to snap your fingers and become the person you always wanted to become, you're still robbing yourself of what's most valuable about that transformation, which is the journey to get there."

I'll have to go back and listen to the rest of their conversation, because from that point on I was in my own world. In that world, I was lost in trying to answer the question: Keith, would you snap your fingers?

I found myself thinking back on a time when I was who I thought I wanted to be.

In the mid 1990s, I went to work as a counselor in a residential wilderness program for at-risk kids in eastern North Carolina. I wasn't in that role long before I knew, one day I'm going to be the director of this camp.

8 years later, I was. I was who I'd wanted to be.

On that treadmill yesterday, I thought back on those 8 years - the journey - the transformation of that counselor to a camp director.

I thought about those early years of being a counselor. The long days and nights. Kids with challenges in their lives I never knew existed. The endless sea of crisis. I thought about the days of feeling hopelessly lost at that sea.

But then I thought about the transformation - the day I felt like there wasn't a sea I couldn't calm in those kids' lives.

I thought about the early days of being a supervisor. How I loved the idea of having people who had to listen to me. I'm the boss. I am your manager.

But then I thought about the transformation - the day I longed to know the people who worked with me, not for me. The day I started wanting to lead people to a place we all wanted to go, and not coerce them into following me to a place I wanted to go.

I thought about the day I had to leave that camp in North Carolina to take a position at one in Tennessee. A growth opportunity, they said. Leave behind a place that had become home for a place where I was a complete stranger - growth?

But then I thought about the transformation. The day I came to realize a lot of people feel like complete strangers in their worlds. Being one for a couple of years helped me better understand those people - grow a heart for them - all the while as I came to better understand me.

I looked back on those early days of being a counselor. I suppose if someone had given me the chance - snap those fingers, Keith - you'll be that camp director. You'll be who you want to be.

My guess is I would have been dancing around and snapping those fingers high in the air - a finger-snapping fool I'd have been.

But then came the bigger question. Keith, you have challenges in your life right now. There are things missing in your life you want, things in it you don't want. There's the dream job. There's the best seller. There's that 100-mile race. The debt you'd like to see erased.

On that treadmill, that question kept coming - if you could snap your fingers and become the person you'd always wanted to become, would you snap your fingers?

The question kept coming until I answered. And I said no.

Just enough times in my life I've had the chance to be who at some point prior to that I'd dreamed of being. Just enough times to know, beyond a doubt, the value in being that person was not found in arriving there. It was found in all that transformed me along the way.

If you're struggling today, it will be tempting to want to snap your fingers. Don't. Something in that struggle is preparing you for who you want to be.

Trusting that is hard. Lord is it hard. But if you snap your fingers, you'll never discover just how true it is.