I know it may be hard to imagine, but occasionally life hands me a task that I don’t anticipate doing. This results in a great deal of angst and teeth gnashing and procrastination. Janice refers to it as “whining” but I think she’s being a little dramatic. Now, you may be tempted to think that procrastinators are lazy, and that may be true in some cases, but I found that some of my best work is done while trying to avoid doing other work.
In fact my work ethic during procrastination is really unbelievable. The lawn has never been mowed more nicely, the blog has never been updated more frequently, and the cars have never been cleaner than when I’m trying to avoid doing my taxes. In fact, I like to keep unpleasant tasks around just so I can get other things done. You may call it procrastination, I call it genius. I am cleverly using an impending unpleasant task as leverage to accomplish great things. Then, I stay up late and work feverishly into the night to get the unpleasant task done one hour after its deadline, thus getting far more done than someone who calmly whittled away at one solitary task. Procrastination is merely the process of distilling motivation down to its most ferocious form and then drinking it all in one sitting.
For example, one day in high school I was sitting innocently in Speech class daydreaming about butterflies and puppies when suddenly the English teacher cruelly snapped me out of my stupor, “Class, we are going to give our How-To speeches today. Keep them about five minutes long. We’ll start on this side of the room,” she pointed to the side of the room opposite of me, “and work across the room this way,” she points in my direction. I was no math whiz but after some quick calculations I figured I better come up with a speech pretty quickly. I calmly reached for notebook paper and pretended to be cooly reviewing and editing my notes trying to hide the reality that I was scribbling a speech from scratch. Finally I settled on a topic. It came my turn and I calmly walked up to the podium. “Today I am going to teach you guys how to procrastinate.” I pointed my gun barrel of procrastinating experience squarely at the assignment, and after blasting away for five minutes, managed to cause some damage. Then came the closing line, “And to prove to you today that I know what I’m talking about, I actually wrote this speech while everyone else was giving theirs.” I smiled, thinking I pulled it off, and glanced at the English teacher and was instantly sorry I did. Her expression of shear disdain seared itself into my retinas. If I close my eyes in a dark room I can still see her scowl. She was not impressed. Still, it was the only speech I ever remember giving in high school so it left an impression on me, if not anyone else.
Let’s be honest though, usually procrastination is like having a volcano exploding in the distance and while the hot lava is slowly oozing towards you, you’re frantically trying to start your car knowing that any second it will fire and get you out of this mess. It just hasn’t fired yet – but it will! Yes, you could get out and start walking but walking is so slow and if you wait a just a little longer, the car will surely start and you can zoom quickly away, making up for all that lost time. The procrastinator banks his future on the expectation that if he just waits a little longer, inspiration will suddenly strike and get him out of his mess. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t.
Procrastination is why you don’t do something. It is resistance. Motivation is why you do something. It is voltage. Sometimes the voltage has to get awfully high before it can push anything through the wires in my brain. We’re officially starting the next phase of our journey to Papua New Guinea: raising support and if anything causes resistance in my life it’s that. So the other day I began questioning if my motivation was strong enough to get this done.
As I was driving into Pennsylvania the other week to give a presentation about what our family is doing with Samaritan Aviation, I found myself asking myself a question, “Why am I doing this?” I pose this question to myself from time to time, usually when I’m doing something stupid like when I find myself pulling into the driveway at work when I really intended to drive to Wal-Mart. “Why am I doing this?” I ask myself. But this time I wasn’t asking myself the question because I was doing something stupid, although I guess that depends on your perspective. Who do I think I am that I’m going around trying to tell people I can go make a difference in a strange country on the other side of the world? Am I arrogant? Or just stupid? Or, worst of all, both? Why can’t I just be happy doing something normal? My parents would sure be happy if I settled down in a neighboring house and started being normal. Don’t get me wrong, my parents are very supportive but the instincts of a grandma and grandpa are to always pull their grandchildren closer. I can’t blame them for that. Am I dragging their grandkids across the world to a risky living situation for a good reason? Who am I to tell my kids they need to give up being normal so I can pursue my calling?
It’s good to have moments of self reflection. Typically as a parent the only time you have for self reflection is while you’re busy cleaning poop out of the bathtub and it sounds something like, “Why did we have kids?” mumbled under your breath. Moments like this are when we’re experiencing the cost of the investment and have momentarily forgotten about the reward. It makes our decisions seem lopsided and not very smart but if we take a step back and get some perspective, we realize there are good reasons we’re doing these hard things.
In heaven maybe we will have the capacity to be entirely comfortable and not lose sight of God but I think while we’re here on earth, comfort is drug that lures us into a useless coma. We’re most alive when we’re standing on a cliff and God is telling us to “Go ahead and jump, I got you!” Following God is jumping off that cliff, experiencing the free fall and the reassuring catch of the Father, delighting in his strong arms, then climbing back up the cliff a little higher this time, and doing it all over again. Each time we become more dependent on his ability to catch us. That’s how God wants it. I do the same thing with my children and we both love it. Unless I drop them, of course, and it ruins this whole analogy.
Now, we credit God for catching us but in reality the strong arms of the Father are typically other people He’s using for His purposes, right? The Bible tells us to be hands and feet of Jesus and that’s how God moves in this world. For whatever reason He has decided to use people to get His will done. I say that God has provided for us during our MMS Aviation apprenticeship, and He has, but in reality His signature isn’t on the checks that we’ve been cashing. It’s regular people giving to help get it done. That’s how God is getting his will done. Through people. That’s why James tells us that saying we love someone without actually helping them is useless. God may not help them if we don’t because I believe our literal hands and feet are God’s preferred method of help. People say that God is cruel or evil or doesn’t exist because they see suffering in the world. They say that God is bad because there’s suffering and because God is bad (or doesn’t exist) they don’t have to listen to him which, ironically, removes their moral responsibility to help with the suffering they see. And so the world gets worse. I think it’s the opposite. God is good and that means He gives us a solemn responsibility to help with the suffering we see because He loves the people who are suffering. Our inaction removes God’s impact on the world allowing evil to prosper. What if the only way people could tell there is a God and He loves them is through the actions we take with our hands and feet?
With all that in mind, we can’t help everyone we see. We need to use wisdom. And I believe God can work his will with or without us. But I think He greatly prefers to use us and blesses us when we allow Him to do so. I also think he calls us to specific purposes. When we step out (a process called faith) to do something hard, it pleases God and he helps us accomplish it. Thank God because this missions thing is something we can’t do by ourselves.
We have an opportunity to help some of the most vulnerable people on earth find hope and medical access, literally fulfilling the parable of the Good Samaritan in one of the least explored countries on the globe. We can life flight critical patients (at no cost to them) to the only hospital in an area the size of Mississippi. We can save children’s lives whose villages have a 40% child mortality rate. We can pull pregnant mothers and their babies, who are living in the country with the world’s highest domestic abuse rate and who are experiencing birth complications, back from the brink of death. We can have the means to help children with cerebral malaria get better. These are all preventable things that won’t be prevented if God’s people don’t go. That’s why He’s asking us to go. Because those people need help and He wants to help them and He’s asking us to do it on His behalf.
But it takes a team. And it’s not cheap (we need to raise about another $2,000 per month in support). But it’s worth it because when your perspective is eternity, human life has tremendous value. That’s what Jesus did for us and so we’re willing to go. Is God calling you to help send us? Click here to become a monthly supporter and help get us to Papua New Guinea. Thank you!
I don’t ask for monthly support lightly but it is a critical part of what God’s calling us to do. And only when I look at what we’ll be involved with do I get enough motivation to ask people to join us. No procrastination allowed!
For more info on what exactly Samaritan Aviation does, click here.
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