“Remember the words of General Douglas MacArthur: ‘There is no security on this earth. There is only opportunity.’ Empty your days of the search for security; fill them with a passion for service. Empty your hours of the ambition for recognition; fill them with the aspiration for achievement. Empty your moments of the need for entertainment; fill them with the quest for creativity.”
-William Arthur Word
(as quoted in John Maxwell’s“The Winning Attitude.”)
“The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”
-Frederick Buechner
Photo by minthu courtesy of photovaco.com
There is an old nursery rhyme that goes something like this: “Mary, Mary, quite contrary, how does your garden grow? With silver bells and cockle shells and pretty maids all in a row.” I’ll leave it to you to interpret what the actual meaning behind this rhyme is or was meant to be, as for now I am only intrigued by the the question, “How does your garden grow?”
This morning my pastor preached a sermon about the garden of Eden called “The Good Life: Phase 2,” explaining how God had created this incredible garden for Adam and Eve to tend to and enjoy. Likewise, God has planted a garden for each of us to tend to and enjoy. However, we too often find ourselves looking for contentment elsewhere.
Picture a well nurtured garden that you have seen. This is easy for me, having grown up on a small farm, with parents who carefully tended their gardens; my dad tended the orchard and crops, while my mother maintained a stunning array of flower and herb gardens, which occasionally even drew newlyweds for photo opportunities.
There is growth, vibrancy, blossoming, potential, tranquility, beauty and love expressed in a well tended, nurtured garden.
Now picture a neglected garden that you may have seen somewhere. I have seen these as well, gardens left untended as generations passed away, gardens overgrown due to inattention by owners caught up in the busyness of life. Weeds are everywhere, choking out the plants that formerly thrived, vines and shrubs and various grasses growing out of control everywhere in haphazard fashion, giving the garden a run-down look.
There is choking, anxiety, depression, unrest, ugliness and the pall of death expressed in a neglected, abandoned garden.
Now, pause and reflect on your own life, your inner self, and picture the garden planted in you. How does your garden grow? Does it grow more like the one nurtured or the one neglected? The good news is that your actions right now, and each moment of your life can affect how your garden grows. You can begin tending it and bring it back to life and vibrancy, or you can get lazy and begin to neglect it allowing it to fall into an ugly, weed infested mess.
Even better news? You aren’t meant to tend your garden on your own! Our friends, family and community all feed into our garden, and most importantly, our Awesome God provides the living water and fertile soil we need to grow strong and be satisfied, which reminds me of a quote from John Piper: “God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him” (see John Piper, Desiring God).
Finally, learn to be content with and in your garden. If you are always searching for a better garden somewhere else, who is left to look after yours?
Have you ever worked on solving a problem that you just couldn’t seem to let go of, no matter how long it was taking? Or perhaps you have found yourself in a constant struggle to maintain focus on the solving problem, but end up doing anything else instead. Eventually, exhaustion and time creep up on you and you finally give in, resolved to tackle it anew the next day.
Then it happens – the next day you look at the problem again, and voilà! the solution presents itself so obviously that you literally smack yourself in the head and announce to no one in particular what an imbecile you are.
Of course, you’re not really an imbecile, just perhaps a little unbalanced. Let me explain. We all need balance in our lives; the right amount of food, the right amount of exercise, the right amount of work (yes, work is a necessary and good thing), and the right amount of leisure, to name a few. We also need to balance our attention, especially given the extraordinary demands on it in this current information age.
Ultimately, we all have limited attention spans, and although some are more limited than others, the key is not to treat this as a problem for which we need a cure, but simply to understand and accept the limits of our attentions span and structure our life and work in a way that best complement it.
For those who tend to have longer attention spans, this may mean the constructive use of deadlines to rein in our über-attention and force us to “Ship It,” as Seth Godin advocates in his excellent book, Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?
For those with shorter attention spans, it may mean the constructive use of time-chunking, or working in chunks of time attuned to our natural attention span, with micro breaks in between to refresh our attention for the next chunk.
My guess is, most of us fall into both categories depending on the time of day, what we are doing, or the setting we are in. The point is, when you feel your attention slipping, it may be time to ship it or chunk it, and find something else to keep your attention.
In a recent blog titled I don’t work, author Jon Acuff admitted that he really doesn’t work, based on the following quote from author James M. Barrie: “Nothing is really work unless you would rather be doing something else.” And Jon Acuff only does that which he would rather be doing.
Many comments followed this post stating the importance of work, and that work was intended as a good thing (God having created man and woman to work in and care for his creation, Genesis 2:15). So how could Jon Acuff, or anyone else for that matter, say it’s not really work when there is nothing else you would rather do?
It is really a matter of definition – and how you define “work” impacts how you live your life.
Have you ever attempted to answer the question, “what is work?” Consider the following advice from Tim Ferris, author of The 4-Hour Workweek
“If you can’t define it or act upon it, forget it.”
Specifically, Ferris suggests asking two questions when considering stress-inducing questions like this:
In our case, can you decide on a single meaning for the term, “Work”? If you can define what work is for you ( and I’m fairly certain all of us can), then is there action you can take to improve your work, or improve what work means to you (I believe the answer should be yes to this question, the problem lies in our willingness to take the necessary action)?
Let’s return to the Jon Acuff post mentioned earlier. It appears that Acuff started out with one definition of work that, when examined under the second question above, could be acted upon to improve things, in his case by redefining “work” based on the Barrie quote, and in light of what gives him fulfillment and life.
In other words, Jon Acuff doesn’t have a job, nor does he have a career, but he has found his vocation, or purpose in life, and while it requires effort, it rarely feels like work. And that makes life worth living to the full.
How do you define work? Is there any action you can take to improve things?
Recommended Reading:
11 Wealth gained by dishonesty will be diminished, But he who gathers by labor will increase.
12 Hope deferred makes the heart sick, But when the desire comes, it is a tree of life.
BibleGateway.com
