In the previous post I talked about how we all want things and often times there are specific people who have what we want. Obviously we need to guard against envy and selfishness but there is also something else we sometimes miss when thinking about what we want in life. If you’re like me, you want it NOW. Or, if we’re practicing patience….next week. We see somebody else who has what we want and we wonder why that can’t be us?
What I often miss is the fact that the person that has what I want, usually put in a ton of time and effort to get it. For instance, the pastor of a hugely influential church may have worked 10 years to get there, sacrificing countless things in the process. He may have saved money for years to prepare for not being paid for the first 3 years of the church’s existence. He may have lost friends in the process of growing the church, because they no longer believed in his vision. He may have gone through tough spiritual battles that typically come with leading a church. God may have done some hard work on him to prepare him for that journey. But, from my perspective, I typically forget about all that and wonder why that can’t be me…..now.
More common is the fact that we usually don’t even know all that information anyway. Most successful people haven’t documented all the things they went through to get where they are. We just assume it happened over night. In the business world Jim Collins calls this the flywheel concept. People inside the loop feel like it takes forever to get great momentum and success and people outside the loop feel like it happened overnight.
I want to never discount the journey and the hard work others put in to get where they are. In terms of a relationship with Jesus, the journey is where we are molded, developed and prepared.
The inspiration for these posts came from watching the video interview with Matt Chandler below. He talks about going from being a janitor to becoming a pastor and the importance of all of that. I’ll never forget my first time teaching middle school kids the Bible, and how beneficial the time I spent in that role was.
