I am reading Brene Brown’s Daring Greatly. She quotes Global activist Lynne Twist who, in her book The Soul of Money, refers to scarcity as “the great lie”.
Twist writes, “For me, and for many of us, our first waking thought of the day is, “I didn’t get enough sleep.” The next one is “I don’t have enough time.” Whether true or not, that thought of not enough occurs to us automatically before we even think to question or examine it. We spend most of the hours and the days of our lives hearing, explaining, complaining or worrying about what we don’t have enough of.
Before we even sit up in bed, before our feet touch the floor, we’re already inadequate, already behind, already losing, already lacking something. And by the time we go to bed at night, our minds are racing with a litany of what we didn’t get, or didn’t get done, that day. We go to sleep burdened by those thoughts and wake up to that reverie of lack.
This internal condition of scarcity, this mind-set of scarcity, lives at the very heart of our jealousies, our greed, our prejudice, and our arguments with life.”
* * *
And so we go through life, driven, driven, driven. Rushing like the Gadarene swine, driven by demons they could not see over a cliff to their destruction.
Driven by ambition to the detriment of our health, mental health, emotional health, relationships.
Driven for validation. To prove our intelligence, spirituality, talent, worth…
Forgetting that all drivenness comes from Satan, never from God.
Driveneness comes from the Accuser and Oppressor of the Brethren, never from the Good Shepherd who gently leads us.
We are driven by Satan, but Christ, he leads us on minute by minute, through his gentle Spirit. We have but to follow.
* * *
And in our drivenness to grab the life we dream of through our own hard work, we forget that there is a far better way, without bleeding fingertips and hearts and lives.
The way of prayer, and trust, and leaving room for God to work his miracles.
We forget The One who Makes Dreams Come True, the weaver, who can weave a technicolour dreamcoat from scraps of discarded wool
The one who can give us our wild dreams, and add no sorrow to them.
The one who says, “Come ye apart from them and be separate.”
The one who says, “Honey Child, you are enough.
I like you just as you are.
Brilliant success won’t make me like you more.
Failure will only make me envelop you more.
In me, you are loved, complete.
In me, child, you are enough!
Turn your gaze to me, and let me fill up the hungry holes in your heart.
Eat me, drink me.
Turn to me when you sense Satan driving,
When you are tempted by striving,
And I will give you rest.”
Read my new memoir: Rosaries, Reading, Secrets: A Catholic Childhood in India (US) or UK.
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More from my site
In Which Drivenness Comes from the Enemy of our Souls, but Christ Gives us Balance
In which the Kindly Light of Christ can Heal our Worst Memories
7 things I learned from Simon Vibert’s “Stress: The Path to Peace”
In which Rest is an Essential Part of the Creative Process
On Being Christian with a small c or a big C
Wonderful, Anita. Truly. Thank you so much.
Diana, thank you for your encouragement. 🙂
oh my. this is calling my name.
i have known this driven posture. what you describe as life with bleeding fingertips and hearts and lives. so vivid. so true.
thank you for speaking this truth loud and long and clear. oh, and “Honey Child” – that just about did me in … 🙂
Lol! Thank you,Kelli.
I used to call my two girls “Honey Child,” when they were toddlers, and I reckon God sees me the same way 🙂
This is what the Sabbath is about: choosing to rest, to accept the idea that trusting God to do what I cannot do means that I can take a break from outward action. Faith and trusting are often the most effective form of action, even if they are only expressed inwardly.
Praying in tongues for an extended time is very difficult for me, as it feels to my impatient self like a waste of time. This just shows how much I am addicted to external stimuli, how difficult it is for me just to sit and soak in God’s presence.
I don’t believe that my chronic foot pain is from God, but on the other hand, I know now that he has worked his kindness through it, inasmuch as I have been drawn to spend more time with him and less time in outward action. I’m more at rest, and I choose every day to trust him to take care of the many things I can’t do and to show me the things I can do.
Hi Don, That’s what I tell myself when I feel driven on the Sabbath. That if I really believed in the power of prayer, I am still working on my heart’s desires, just in a different way, through the power of prayer rather than sweat!
I love the point you make about driven-ness I’m prone to it! I struggle with the personification of evil as Satan getting the blame for it! I see it as the worst of me. One of the many imperfections I ask Gods grace & healing for everyday!
Hi Jayne,
Yeah, was just playing with the idea. Of course, drivenness can come from our childhood, environment and fallen human nature as well as from Satan.
It’s just when drivenness leads to the loss of health, and relationship and happiness and peace that one thinks that God had little to do with it, but Satan would delight in it!
Ax
Interesting…I rarely if ever feel that way, but I’m not a very driven person, busy, but not too driven. I generally see the list of tasks not getting done more of a function of my flawed time management rather than a desire to have more hours in a day.
There is a great litany in the Seder tradition called Dayenu. Of course, with anything to do with Seder, the exact text varies from Haggadah to Haggadah. But in the one our family uses, it lists all the miracles of God’s redemption in the Moses story and after each is read, we respond with “We would have been grateful and content”…if God’s only act of redemption was to part the waters…we would have been grateful and content…etc…I think it’s a fantastic reminder to us to BE grateful and content with all that God pours out to us.
Lovely. I love that litany you mention. Hadn’t heard of it before. Will look it up.
I am, sadly, quite driven–came from a family with impossibly high expectations of me. I am learning to pause and try to see where God is leading, and to lead a full and somewhat balanced life rather than give in to my own restless drivenness.