Over the past week, I've been reading Ordering Your Private World by Gordon MacDonald - and thinking to myself, I wish someone had introduced me to this ages ago! I might have done things very differently had I read and internalised the truths in this book - then again, being stubbornly human, I might have chosen to learn things the hard way anyway.
At the start of the book, MacDonald starts by describing the driven person as being 'caught in a golden cage' - all the talent and productivity and achievement associated with driven people may look good on the outside, but driven people are really trapped in a cycle of striving and are never at rest. He describes what he terms the 'sinkhole syndrome' - or what takes place for driven people when a crisis hits. Because they have not built a solid foundation of inner strength, because their external accomplishments have not been in sync with a cultivated inner discipline, they crumble from the inside when the pressure becomes too great.
He then contrasts driven people to people who are called - people who possess an inner resilience that comes from knowing who they are, knowing their purpose, and knowing they are only stewards of what they have, in limited amounts - time, energy, resources, ability. As such, they don't strive to do everything or be everything - they don't need to prove anything to themselves or to others.
It was a painful reminder that for much of my life, I have been an incredibly driven person - displaying all the traits that he described of a driven person - goal-oriented, ungracious, competitive, impatient, dissatisfied, seeing people and things as means to my ends, and so on. The worst part is, because the world rewards driven people so well by giving them more achievements, more titles, more accolades, more power - driven people even start priding themselves on those traits. Or at least I did, telling myself that without them, I wouldn't be as ambitious - I would be unproductive, lazy, and I would be wasting my life. What started out as good intentions, as a desire to live my life to the fullest - often turned into something ugly.
The secret garden
I've been realising lately how little importance I've placed on nurturing my inner world when it hit me that my perpetual feelings of being tired and exhausted was not going away with more hours of sleep, more healthy eating, or more exercise. These external attempts were not solving an inner, deeper problem. I knew that my physical exhaustion was because deep inside of me, my heart was not at rest. My soul was not content.
MacDonald describes the inner world as a sort of private garden that required constant tending, that when well-kept, was like a secret hideaway, a source of deep joy. It hit me that my inner world was like a private garden left to neglect because I had spent so much time cultivating the external.
I thought of sharing some excerpts from my journal as all these realisations started coming at me - because I believe that I am not alone in this struggle. Conversation after conversation I have with those around me reveals to me that so many of us struggle with with busyness, with feeling constantly out of breath and unable to find rest. And I hope and pray that some of what God has been speaking to me might speak to you too, and that we might, together, be unafraid to take a U-turn and say, maybe we have been trying to do life completely wrong, and maybe there's a better way to do it.
Thoughts from a journal
March 27, 2013
I am learning, these days, more and more about what it means to find my identity in Him alone. I'm learning what it means to find peace with who He's made me to be and who He's called me to be. You would think that ten years on from hitting puberty and wrestling with all that teenage angst, I'd be wrestling with different issues by now - but I'm still coming back to learning to be comfortable in my own skin - learning to make peace with who God created Crystal Cha to be.
I'm being reminded that I cannot place my identity in my work, my hobbies, or my relationships - or the moment I start feeling uncertain about any one of them, the moment the dynamics of any one of them changes, my identity is shaken as well.
March 29, 2013
For too long I have been getting by on talent - now I am beginning to see that those less gifted will quickly catch up if they have invested years of practiced discipline, because they did not take their accomplishments for granted, like I often have. I may have gotten through college and university without much studying or effort, and succeeding in academic terms may have come easily to me. But talent is a limited source of strength.
In order to continue advancing forward without burning out, I must invest myself in building up my self-discipline and mental resilience. Spiritual, emotional, relational, career, or any other growth will not happen by accident. I must work to make it happen.
March 31, 2013
Why do I do this? I asked myself. I knew it was not my body or legs that I needed to subdue - it was my heart and mind I need to deal with. I am stubborn and rebellious by nature, and incredibly self-centered a lot of the time. I knew God was teaching me something about the why I do what I do. It cannot be for myself or for anyone else. That will not be enough motivation to deny myself when the going gets tough, to make sacrifices in submitting to another person, to press on when discouragement sets in. He reminded me that the only motivation that will sustain me through tiredness and frustration is knowing deeply that I have been called to do what I am doing.
When we operate out of a sense of calling, everything changes. We stop saying 'if only' and we stop looking for shortcuts, easy ways out, or little compromises we can get away with to make life more 'bearable'. When we are called, even in the difficult times when we know we could walk away and no one would fault us for it, we press on. Because we know that calling it quits would be denying ourselves of a God-ordained opportunity to be used by Him.
When you're called, you stop being destination-oriented and you start being journey-oriented. You stop asking, 'Are we there yet?' and you start asking, 'God what are you teaching me here, now?' And when you are called, you do what you do with or without recognition, with or without reward or pain, even if you need to swallow your pride, even if people don't get it - because it was never about those things in the first place. When you're called, it's not about the external - it's all about the heart.
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