Monday, November 14, 2011

Too Content To Try

I was reading Seth Godin's blog today and really started to think about a section in it:

"It's difficult to change an industry, set a world record, land big clients, or do art that influences others. When faced with this difficulty, those with other, seemingly better options see the barrier and walk away.

Why bother? The thinking is that we can just pump some more oil or smile and gladhand our way to an acceptably happy outcome.

On the other hand, people who believe they have fewer options take a look at the barrier and realize that even though it will be difficult to cross, it's the single best option they've got."

Godin's blog is always very business related, but his logic always makes me think. People who have lots of resources don't tackle the one problem in their way, they look for other options. Those with less resources understand they need to solve this problem, there are no other options, and start to work on it.

The danger of having too many resources is eventually you stop dealing with problems, you lose focus of why you're even there in the first place.

And this got me to thinking about church, specifically mine. Do we have so many resources that when we hit a problem we should be solving we instead skirt the issue and try to think of another way around it? Take evangelism, something every Christian should be doing. But it's hard, it's time consuming, it may even be uncomfortable. So instead of me sharing my faith, I'll just use other resources, give money to the church to print a flyer and mail it. I'm still evangalizing, right? If we didn't have the resources to print a flyer, we'd have to go door to door, but since we have the resources, we're just solving the problem in a new inventive way.

The problem with skipping the problem and solving it the right way is you usually don't get the right result. Like above, instead of me sharing my faith and growing in Christ, instead of a person get a one-to-one message of God's love from a person who has experienced it, they get a pretty piece of paper they may never read and we get to sit at home without doing any real service or sharing. Who's growing now?

Maybe instead of looking at how we can use the things around us to get out of living our faith, we should be trying to figure out how we can strengthen our souls so we are doing the things we should be doing...

T

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