What was your five-year plan, five years ago? What about your two-year plan, two years ago? Whenever I ask people that question, it arouses either laughter or frustration. I know it does for me, too. I laugh at how naïve I was in thinking I knew what I wanted. And there are times I am frustrated at how miserably I’ve failed in achieving these plans. I admit that, despite being only twenty years old, there are times I can already feel the walls of the hourglass suffocating me. With each precious grain of time that slips out from underneath my feet, I become more aware of how small and insignificant my life has been. The mirror of reality is hardly reflective of the many aspirations and fabricated ideas I have developed of what a successful and fulfilling life looks like. I want more.
More. Generally, Christians don’t give this four-letter word enough credit, labeling this innate desire as sin and encouraging us to suppress it. But just like friends, money, and sex, the hunger for more is not wrong unless we feed it with the wrong things at the wrong time. Wasn’t it Christ who commanded us to “Be perfect”? Jesus was in no way naïve to our incompetence in carrying out this order. Rather, He knew that if He merely commanded us to “try hard” or “do your best”, we would no doubt, in our own minds, find that we had achieved this. He built the drive for more into us in hopes that it would be the vehicle to bring us closer to Him. We must stop perceiving this instruction to “Be perfect” as a gauge in how miserably we’ve failed and begin to view it as an invitation to always grow nearer to the God of the universe. Whenever you begin to crave more of success, relationships, money, food, sex, etc., redirect that desire toward Christ and I promise He will satisfy you. I am convinced that if we were to truly realize how many gifts, hand-wrapped by God, we let pass us by daily, we would wake up each morning feeling like a ten-year-old child on Christmas morning. Throw out any mentality of finding a “happy medium” in Christianity- for to be happy is to be fully devoted and passionately pursuing Christ and to be “medium” is to be miserably discontent or falsely comforted. Never settle for how good your walk with Him was yesterday. His plan for you and I is always unfathomably better than the ones we create for ourselves. Without realizing it, each goal I make can become an additional layer on the wall separating me from experiencing God’s best. My own high expectations become the cage imprisoning me. There is so much more. Free me from my own definition of success, Lord, and feed my hunger with more of You.
