Henry David Thoreau wrote that “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.”
Why?
Why do so many people live lives of desperations?
I am convinced it is because most people live below their potential and satisfy themselves with the least amount of work possible.
A Shared Experience
On Day One of “Movement Maker Challenge,” Pedro Adao shared a pattern of thinking that I shared with him.
Both Pedro and I experienced horrific thinking when we were told to go to bed.
Pedro shared how he, from the age of 8-10 and through high school, would lie in bed and think about dying.
He shared that “as I got older, I discovered I wasn’t afraid of dying. I was afraid of never living at a level enough to know that my life would matter.”
I shared the same experience.
Our lives needed meaning. We needed to know that our lives mattered.
For many people experience what Private Ryan experienced in the moving, Saving Private Ryan.
Ryan found out that a group of men sacrificed their lives to save him. As Captain John H. Miller lies wounded on the bridge, he tells Ryan with his dying breath, “James, earn this. Earn it.”
Ryan lives his life trying to “earn it.”
As he tells Captain Miller’s grave marker, “Every day I think about what you said to me that day on the bridge. And I’ve tried to live my life the best I could. I hope that was enough. I hope that at least in your eyes, I’ve earned what all of you have done for me.”
A Shared Desire
Pedro, me, and millions of others want to live a life that matters and is worth remembering.
So how do we do that?
How do we live out this desire to have a meaningful life that matters?
We need to live out God’s calling on our lives.
We are told in Ephesians 2:10, “For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them”(ESV).
Henry Martyn, an Anglican priest, and missionary is quoted as saying, “I am immortal until God’s work for me to do is done.”
If God has prepared good works for us to walk in, He will protect us as we go through the storms in life on our way to these good works.
Dealing With The Storms In Life
In Mark 4:35, Jesus was speaking to His disciples. “He said to them, ‘Let us go across to the other side.'”
Then in verse 37 we read “And a great windstorm arose, and the waves were breaking into the boat.”
Did Jesus not know about the storm that was coming? If He didn’t know, He would not be God since God is omniscient.
Since Jesus knew the storm was coming and told the disciples they were going to the other side, they should have known that they would arrive on the other side.
Yet the disciples then, like us now, see storms in our lives and are filled with fear.
Jesus was literally in the boat with them.
He was asleep in the stern, verse 38, but the experienced fishermen woke Jesus and asked “do you not care that we are perishing?”
Jesus nonchalantly calmed the storm with a strongly worded rebuke.
A Shared Need
The disciples literally had been walking with Jesus for a while. They had seen what Jesus was able to do.
The problem they had, and we do too, is that that knowledge was stuck in their heads and had not become incorporated into their hearts and mind.
As Pedro said on Day One of “Movement Maker Challenge”, “There is no breakthrough without follow through.”
Just as the disciples knew in their heads what Jesus could do, we know plenty of strategies and tactics to grow our side-hustles and/or businesses.
What we need to do apply what we know. It must become part of us.
Pedro said that “without application, there’s no transformation.”
This is true in our faith and in our business.
A Shared Fear
The disciples feared dying. The storm was beating the boats to toothpicks. I presume they also feared they’d make a mistake getting into that boat; feared they were mistaken to have followed Jesus; and feared leaving their previous lives.
Most of us do not try new things because we fear making mistakes.
We stay in jobs that we don’t like because we don’t want to make a mistake by going to another job that could be worse.
We fear making a mistake and not being able to make a living working as someone that is full-time self-employed.
Most mistakes are overwhelmingly non-lethal.
We can always go get another job.
What we can’t go get is time spent with our family.
Don’t trade the mistake of feeling “free in a job” that robs you of having time, financial, and moral freedom.
A Shared Roadmap
Pedro and I believe that the best way to have a life that matters is to be part of a movement.
“All movements have a CAUSE. Movements take a STAND FOR and AGAINST something.”
People will unite in a shared interest or passion.
Find those with the same passion as you. Provide value to them. And offer them a way to pay you.
You will then live a life that provides for your family’s needs and also provide value to others.
