Luke 9:62 Jesus replied, No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for service in the kingdom of God. In this passage of the Bible, Jesus discussed the cost of following him. Yesterday, I was talking about living your passion and I alluded a little to the cost of doing so. Yes, there are costs both big and small to living your passion everyday. I will elaborate on just a few in this post to just give you an idea of what will likely come your way as you live in a totally new way, according to your passion and purpose. The Cost of Family. I don’t mean here that you cast off your family and never speak to them again. However, you might have to stop sharing your hopes and dreams with them. You know, for most of us, our families love us and want the very best for us. They want to protect us and keep us from getting hurt. This can be a double-edged sword. When we are growing us, our families were needed to make decisions for us and care for us. That is great. The problem is that after we are grown and able to make decisions for ourselves, many times they still think they know what is best for us. They want to keep us safe and protected. When we start to tell them how we want to live our passion and how we want to truly live our lives to the fullest, they often tell us to get real and to look around at the circumstances of our lives. They tell us that those types of things never happen to people like us. You can get hurt if you try to accomplish something that grand!! You have a good job now, why jeopardize that? They tell us all the reasons why our plan to live out our passion will not work and why we will only be disappointed in the end. In his book, As a Man Thinketh, James Allen writes, “Circumstance doesn’t make a man, it reveals him to himself… Men are anxious to improve their circumstances, but are unwilling to improve themselves.” Your circumstances have nothing to do with who you really are inside. You can take your passion and manifest it into a satisfying life or God would not have given it to you in the first place. In fact, Wayne Dyer suggests that you should act like what you want to manifest is already in your life no matter what your current circumstances are. The Cost of Friends. Many times to live out your passion, you will need to get a whole new set of friends. I talked about family above and, in some ways, your family is your family. This is not true with friends. Why might a new set of friends be likely in your life? Take a look at your closest friends. Your habits, desires, style of dress, net worth, and general lifestyle are the same as theirs. If your friends smoke, you smoke. If your friends are constantly hiding from creditors, you are hiding from them as well. If your friends are spendthrifts, you are likely to be the same. Do you want to know how much money you have in your bank account? No, don’t look at your account, ask your friends how much money each one has in his or her bank account and average the amounts. That is pretty much what you have in your bank account. Try it and see. To manifest your passion you need to have like-minded people in your life. This does not necessarily mean that these people will have the same passion as you do only that they too are living their passions. They are achievers!!! They want to accomplish something with their lives and are doing it!! These are the types of people you should seek out as new friends. The Cost of Ridicule. I remember when I went back to school to get my PhD, one of my friends, Poor Sack Simmons, joked that I had been to every school in the United States (Poor Sack could have been a great comedian himself … the man could keep you laughing for days – that was his talent). I had been to a few schools trying to find myself come to think of it. The good thing is that I was DOING SOMETHING during that time and trying to figure things out. At the time, other than my school teachers, I did not know of anyone that had gone to college, especially anyone in the small town that I grew up in. I knew I had a desire and a talent for easily learning new things especially in science and math but I had no idea how to manifest that in such a way to satisfy my deepest urges. But getting back to my point of ridicule. When people don’t understand what you doing (you may not understand exactly what you are doing yourself at some points in your journey), they will ridicule and criticize you. The thing you are moving to might seem impossible to them. Can you imagine Christopher Columbus telling people he was going to sail around the world to the East by sailing west? At the time, most people thought the world was flat. I am sure many ridiculed and criticized him and told him he was going to kill his “fool” self by sailing west. He was simply going to sail off the end of the earth and lose his life and his ships most of them thought. Even more, can you imagine the stories people were telling when he did not return for many months on that first voyage? I can almost hear one neighbor saying to another, “you know that dang fool Christopher Columbus sailed away from here two or three months ago. I would bet my right arm we will never heard from that crazy lunatic again. Anybody with any common sense knows you can’t get to the Indies unless you go east.” I don’t know what your particular passion might be but trying to satisfy it might sound as strange to people around you as sailing west to get to the Indies did to the people of Columbus’ time. Anytime people don’t understand what another person is doing, they ridicule or criticize their actions. It’s just the way we are. The Cost of Sweat. Thomas Edison once said, “genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.” Look, we all are geniuses in something. I really believe that. You are a genius. Everybody has that gift (or in that lucky few, gifts) that qualifies us as a genius. Believe me, it is there if you would just look. However, just because you are a genius does not mean that the talent you have does not need to be cultivated. I like sports and sometimes genius is easier to see in the sports world than in other areas because so many of us relate to it. In basketball, LeBron James, Kevin Durant, and Kobe Bryant are among the best players in the sport. You would think that those guys could just sit back and chill and wait for the season to start so they could miraculously turn on their skills and dominate the NBA. Well, it does not work like that. Yes, these are three talented dudes, no doubt about it. However, they are also the hardest workers (or at least among the hardest workers) in the entire NBA. You would think that less talented players would be the ones working the hardest but it is the best that are the hardest workers. Look, no matter how talented you are, it still takes hard work to be the best. Peyton Manning is about to break Brett Favre’s passing touchdown record in the next week or so. Yet Manning is still one of the hardest workers in the entire NFL. And even though you are a genius, the genius in you will only bear fruit with hard work. You will go through some trial and errors in finding your way. People asked Thomas Edison how could he still look for a way to develop an electric light even though he had failed over 1000 times to do so. He said he hadn’t failed, he has just figured over 1000 ways that would not work, and, therefore, he was closer than ever to seeing this dream manifested. You might run into a few failures before you find your way but hard work can overcome that if you are true to your passion and purpose.
Posted on: Fri, 17 Oct 2014 03:58:04 +0000
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