God Will Meet You Half Way
What happens when you are completely self-disciplined and you do everything in your power and things still don’t work out the way you wanted them to? How do you deal with that? What does that mean? This question and others like it are common for people to ask me in attempting to explain their own shortcomings in life, their own unfortunate tragedies and disappointments in life, or out of curiosity for finding out how I deal with mine.
For example I’ve had many people in the last few years ask me how I felt about coming in 2nd place in the Toastmasters International World Championship of Public Speaking. They often ask if I would enter the contest again, or if I’m upset, or how I’ve developed peace about falling short of one of – what was at the time- the most important goals in my life.
In order to understand my response you have to first understand the payoffs of self-discipline. The payoffs of self-discipline are many but the two primary ones are peace and freedom. Peace is the one that is relevant here.
In the forthcoming Take the Stairs book there is an entire chapter on The Perspective Principle of Faith but the basic premise of the chapter is that Faith is choosing to trust that what is happening now is for a greater good later on. The beauty of investing self-discipline into any endeavor or goal is that at the end of the day, when the results are tallied, or the outcome is delivered then you are able to know with absolute supreme confidence that you did every single thing that you had control over to make it work.
And because of the confidence you can have that you did everything in your power then you can absolutely know for sure that if things didn’t turn out the way you wanted, then God must have some reason for why things didn’t turn out the way you hoped. See the payoff? If you did everything you could and didn’t get the results you wanted, then you know God wanted it to go the way it did because if he wanted it to go another way – it would’ve. So there is PEACE in knowing that it went exactly the way it was supposed to because you know that it wasn’t your fault even though you “fell short” or that you experienced some pain or tragedy.
The bummer about doing things half-assed or with a lack of commitment is that when they don’t work out the way you want them to then there is no way to know for sure if it’s your fault or if it’s his plan. So there is frustration and despair. Frustration and despair is what waits for those who wait to work.
Peace is the payoff from someone with self-discipline because they live a life focused on controlling what they can control and focused on having Faith in God for the rest. It’s kind of like my close friend and Southwestern student manager Tracey once told me, “God will meet you half way. Do your best and let him deal with the rest.”
If you’re doing your best and things aren’t going the way you hoped then take heart and relax knowing that someone else is in control and you are operating perfectly within that plan. If you’re not doing you best, then get your butt to work.
See you in the stairwell,
Rory Vaden
Take the Stairs – Success means doing things you don’t want to do
Tags: Peace, Self-Discipline
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January 1, 2011 at 8:46 pm
Great article Rory..
Especially the part about knowing you are doing your best and experiencing “peace”. I’m not quite there yet – but a big word for me this year is Peace. And Trust.
January 3, 2011 at 9:02 pm
Thanks for the compliment of tuning in Viveka! Yeah, I’m noticing that Peace is a biggie for a lot of people right now I think. Especially ultra performers like you. Overall Peace is one thing I’ve always been lucky with because I’ve just firmly believed and had clarity about what God is using me for. I do my best walking that path and when it doesn’t happen I guess I’ve always felt it must be because of him.
The place where I’ve been struggling to gain peace is with the relentlessness of incoming emails. I’mve come a long way in managing all of them and creating systems but I’m embarrassed at how many times I still get stressed out because I have a bunch of unprocessed email. I don’t talk about it necessarily with family but it definitely affects my attitude.
A bunch of my email isn’t what I consider to be “work” as it might be socializing, or something to do with my finances, or whatever so I don’t think of it as working all the time but I still need to mature in letting go of that as a reason to be stressed. Glad to make your connection and I look forward to staying in touch.
February 18, 2011 at 1:26 am
Great post… I’ve seen this work first hand in my personal and professional life. You have to be commited to self discipline and also be “real” with yourself. To many people just talk about what they need to be doing. The true majic is in taking action and getting real with yourself. Then you can start recieving gods true grace and peace. Thanks for sharing Rory!