Please enjoy this excerpt from Manage Your Mission – Living wisely and abundantly for today and eternity. This book will help craft your life mission, establish its priorities, and succeed in each area: Faith – Family – Fitness – Field – Friends – Fun – Finances.
No matter the category, including all of the 7 Fs, there will always be better and worse people than you at something. Even if you are the best in the world at something, it will only be temporary. So don’t have undue pride in being better than some, and don’t have a false humility because you aren’t as good as others. Just compare yourself to yesterday’s version and challenge yourself to improve.
As you know, applications like Facebook are generally highlight reels of people’s lives. You must remind yourself of that often, or you’ll get depressed and think everyone else has a better life than you. Remarkably few people post unflattering selfies or videos of ugly arguments with family members.
My wife and I have been doing ballroom dancing for about twelve years, and I remember how humbling it can be when you begin. When I encourage newer dancers, they often compare themselves to us or others who have been dancing for a long time. So I flip the script and ask, “Are you a better dancer than you were a few months ago?” Their faces brighten, and they can describe how much progress they’ve made. It resets their perspective to something realistic. That’s the way we should approach improving in all these areas.
I had to take my advice when recovering from those intense cancer treatments. I lost an alarming amount of weight, and coming back was hard. What used to be warm-up weights were now heavy sets. But I reset my expectations and just accomplished what I could. I didn’t compare myself to other people or even to the previous version of me. And for what it is worth, every doctor and nurse I talked to said that exercising as best I could made a big difference to my recovery.
Copyright 2022
Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible
Eternity Matters 