I am one of those people who probably spends too much time thinking about unimportant things. But, at some level it really bothers me that I cannot slice cheese as well as my wife can. We have this little tool in our house that is designed for the sole purpose of slicing cheese. (No, it is NOT an old-fashioned "cheese slicer", this thing is much more cool.) Give her the cheezomatic and a block of cheese and she can create nice, even, unbroken slices. Place the same tool in my hand and you come out with random, crumbly, cheese-like things. It is quite frustrating. For a while I got by blaming it on the cheese. I would make crazy statements like, "Well this Colby is just too soft. If you would get a decent medium cheddar then I would show you how to slice cheese!" The truth is I just don't have the cheese-slicing gene. I have had enough practice now to know that it goes beyond training and into a deeper design flaw that exists within me.
Though I realize this is not such a big deal if it were relegated purely to cheese... the fact is that there are other things in life that I am just not designed to do. It is not that I am unable to do them, just that I will never reach my full potential by doing them. Were my life a giant kitchen whose purpose was to create sandwiches, you would not want to put me on the "cheese slicing" station. Sure I could do the job, but I would slow down the entire kitchen simply because I was attempting to live outside of my design.
One of the things that God has been helping me accomplish this last year is to know myself better. (Did a certain Shakespeare reference pop into anyone else's mind right then?) It may sound odd, but I don't think that people spend enough time really getting to know who they are, what they love, and how they were created to operate. And, if they do go through that process they rarely have the courage to then change their life in order to maximize their impact on this earth.
Most people I meet seem to live under the assumption that the best possible outcome for their life is the one that just happened to them while they were growing up. They made decisions, they met people, they got jobs, and this is their life. It is as if every decision they made along the way was the perfect decision and so nothing should be questioned anymore. That seems pretty arrogant to me, but I think the real culprit is fear.
Most people do not have the courage to leave a life of cheese-slicing even after they realize that it is not what they were designed for. Cheese-slicing pays the bills, it is safe, it is constant, it is known. It is also an illusion. An illusion of security, of fulfillment, of satisfaction, of meaning...
So, what about my dear readers? Have you taken the time to really look at who you are and how God has designed you? Have you then taken that knowledge and compared it to where you happen to be in life? If the two do not match up perfectly... then are you willing to take the steps necessary to start down a new road where they could?
3 comments:
well, I'm more than a little uncomfortable now. (That's probably a high compliment for this kind of post.) Thanks for some added tension in my day.
That was Paul btw.
I have seen you slice cheese. It is good that you are uncomfortable! :)
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