You Can Do Anything, But Not Everything

You can do anything you want if you just put your mind to it. Have you heard that before? Maybe your parents or a favorite teacher said that to you when you were growing up. It is a huge blessing to know people love and believe in you. It is an awesome experience to work hard for something and to have success and achievement. But I wonder if sometimes we've taken the belief that we're capable of doing anything and have mistaken it to mean that in our life we'll actually be able to accomplish everything that catches our interest.

I don't know about you, but I'm a recovering workaholic. Some of the most important people in my life are the ones who have urged me to quit biting off more than I can chew, to put on the brakes, to do fewer things, and to do them well. I have a hard time stopping the cycle where I take on a new task, convinced that with enough time I can master it or make it better, and then before I'm done with it, I've already picked up another. And then another. If I'm not careful, I'll end up with a pile of good intentions, but little accomplished that feels satisfying. 

In a timeless universe where our bodies would never wear down, we could learn to play every instrument, speak every language, build every structure, read every book, win every award, and accomplish everything we intend to do. But that isn't the universe where we live. We live under the restraints of time and of energy which get soaked up with the many thorns, thistles, and unexpected obstructions we encounter.

I'm reminded of the classic song lyrics from Jim Croce: "There never seems to be enough time to do the things you want to do, once you find them."

We can do some things very well, but the truth is that all of us will have things we look at and say, "If only I had more time, I could have done more, and I could have done better." Knowing that we are going to have to leave some things undone should make us deliberate about what things we commit ourselves to doing. Jesus said in Matthew 16:24a-25:

"If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it."

It isn't just the image of suffering for Jesus--picking up the cross--that's important here. It's also the idea that there will be parts of my life that I have to let go, because otherwise I won't give God the space in my life that God deserves. To deny yourself means giving up something. To lose something means you won't have it. On the face of these ideas, that sounds unpleasant. We really will have to say 'no' to some things in order to say 'yes' to God.

But at the other end of this promise is something more hopeful. Jesus assures us that when we willingly deny ourselves and lose something because of our dedication to him, by some wonderful mystery, it is for this very reason that we'll end up finding it again. "Great is your reward in Heaven," he says. Our losses, whatever they are, will be temporary, and God's generous blessings to us will one day overwhelm any sense of lacking we might have had before. Don't let the many things that interest you distract you from the one thing that matters most.