Stay the Course

I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong … nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance happens to them all.

-          Ecclesiastes 9:11

How many times do you have to do something wrong

before you finally decide to do something different?

Every year between Christmas and Valentine’s Day, we break out the memes, “walking into next year like…” and everything is stamped #NewYearNewMe.  The same holds true every time you see a relationship end.  There’re weeks of subliminal messages that end in something like #NewLookNewMe, but what’s actually new about you?  Everywhere we turn, we are bombarded with mystified messages of everything that we’ve done wrong in previous years being magically washed away by the word “new”.  Newness is this ultimate attainment that has us profusely professing to be “starting over”, just to end up right back where we were.

So, when does enough finally become enough?  I write this, not only because I’ve had millions of my own “fresh starts”, not after witnessing the repeated “fresh starts” of others, but because I’ve come to realize that none of our fresh starts are all that fresh.  Every time we experience a break up, lose a job, calendars change, or when things just don’t work out the way that we expect them to, we watch the ball, or metaphorically wait for the “other shoe” to drop, and kind of like a starter pistol, the second it hits ground, the race is on…but when will we finally finish?

There is this moment when we reach some type of epiphany.  We entangle ourselves with one of those made for TV ‘eureka’ moments that somehow convince us that who we are, or where we are, in our faith, in our family, our relationships, or life in general, is not who or where we’re supposed to be. 

It is as if this revelation hits you all at once, clearing your mind and forcing your lungs to take in air that you’ve never breathed.  Although you’ve lived, breathed and slept in the same space for years, suddenly your life has gone terribly wrong and there’s a quick fix to get everything back on track.  All you need is the word “new”.

So, what do we do?  In the past, we would block people’s phone numbers from our cellphone; break up with those who we decided we were in dead-end relationships with, deleting dozens of people from our address books, and metaphorically, our lives.  Now that social media has hit, we tweet about all the great things we’re going to do now that we’re #FREE or #SuperSingle! We delete people on Facebook, and unfollow them on Instagram and Twitter.  All this we do in the name of change and “cleaning out our closet”.

We’ve all “cleaned out our closet” at one time or another, haven’t we?  We’ve gone to bed thinking everything is fine and awakened suddenly to a closet full of skeletons haunting our hopes of a bright future.  So, we changed jobs and ended “unhealthy” relationships that we’d thought were perfectly fine, under the guise of taking our lives back, but from who? Who has it??

For nearly 30 years of my life, someone else told me what I was going to be or what I was going to do, based on all of the things that I do well, the many areas in which I exceled, never thinking to ask what I wanted. I now realize that even when the words were said in my voice, most often, it was still the thoughts and ideas of others. 

As humans, we are all shaped and molded to a particular interest. On the broadest of scales, we call it childrearing.  Though this statement is largely controversial, it cannot be denied. The child of an entrepreneur is groomed to grow up and join the family business just as the sons of sharecroppers were trained and educated to grow up and “be better”. We don’t impress these things upon our children to hurt or harm them, we do it because we want what’s best for them, not realizing that we’re altering their image of themselves.

Proverbs 18:16 says, “a man’s gift maketh room for him, and bringeth him before great men”.  So, why does your path need to look like anyone else’s if your gift is your own?  In the same fashion that God made a way for your parents and others, can He not make a way for you?

What makes life hard for us oftentimes, is our failure to cut the strings.  We allow ourselves to be puppeted out of ignorance, yes, but more often out of fear.  Fear tells us to abandon our dreams because it’s hard work, unchartered territory, or just because we already have a job, or a life lain out before us and we’re comfortable with what we have.  We may not be living in our purpose, we may not have joy, or even be happy, but we’re comfortable enough to feel safe.  So, we run our race, not realizing that being tethered by those strings is what prevents us from finishing. Meanwhile, those of us who are puppeted and do actually finish the race, we do so on our hands and knees.

We tire ourselves out running a race with the weight of others’ opinions, ramblings and ideas tethered to our waist.

So, the next time you find yourself starting over, ask yourself, “how did I get here?” Which of the f’s landed me in this space – ‘fear’, or ‘following’ the promptings of others? If either of them played a role in why you’re ready to give up,

because if you’re going to crawl across a finish line, shouldn’t your dreams be waiting on the other side?

#StayTheCourse

Follow Me as I Follow God

@RevealingRuth