Despite identical rations, our two dogs would always suspect that the other got a better deal and so fight over their food … until the smaller one, having climbed into its bowl, was itself suspected of being a better meal – they don’t compete any more. But dogs have always competed this way, for status in the pack.
My son was 3 when he learnt to fight back – “Mom, he hit me”. In reply she said: “We don’t tell on our brother unless he is danger”. 5 minutes later he was back: “Mom my brother’s in danger”. “Why is he in danger, son?” - “Because he hit me”. Now my two sons play other games, like “He has been on that video game at least one whole lifetime longer than I have”. Soon they may need sneakers, shades and a cell-phone just to qualify for the game of life.
Of course we “grow up” and our games become more subtle - we usually replace conflict with cosmetic or symbolic things to enhance our actual or perceived status.
The $trillion cosmetics industry proves how desperately we need to be more than we are. We enlarge breasts … well women do anyway, but barely has the silicon set before they complain that men are looking at them.
Others go to great lengths to shorten their skirts and then work as hard to keep them down to their knees. Men have their ups and downs too … a colleague recently bought a costly BMW X5, so I asked him “if you drive your house, what do you live in?” … “In a shack” he answered.
Confucius pondered these things and observed how "men will lose their health to make money and then lose their money to restore their health. They will think anxiously about the future and forget the present, such that they live neither for the present nor the future and live as if they will never die, and then die as if they had never lived..... "
Nowhere is this more true, than for those who get to the top to find that someone else has done better than them – reducing their success to no success at all, partly because they can’t recognize success for what it is, but mainly because they had no objective measure of success to start with.
The key is to have an internal frame of reference.
Customer value is a valid yardstick or frame of reference for business success, yet firms still tend to measure their successes in terms of competitors’ achievements. “We have 25% market share … so hey, hey” … as though that’s enough. And the competitor then gets to define what we should be doing, not our customers.
Similarly individuals use their neighbors as a frame of reference – they feel okay as long as another seems worse off - or they compare themselves negatively and slip into a slavish pattern of living to everyone else’s standards … a dead-end.
Without a reference point, many will even become “technically successful” but miss the moment as it passes – rather becoming sick, psychotic or suicidal – another dead-end.
And then there are those who succeed by all external measures – but having conquered everything, they die of stress anyway and pass it all to their children to stress about … and in that one brief moment they finally achieve an elusive sense of family unity and purpose – their children even remember them and find something nice to say … but it’s a dead end anyway.
Okay … So how can you develop an internal frame of reference or homing mechanism?
In terms of sport I have taught my boys, two things. Keep your eye on the ball and don’t try too hard. As soon as someone is watching them, they try too hard, lift their heads and beat the air, so I take them back to basics and in no time they are fine again. In the same way you need to keep your eye on your personal values, priorities and objectives – so you can have a point of reference to guide your decisions and measure your achievements.
Peter’s idea of keeping his eye on the ball amounted to fixing his eyes on Jesus so that he did not sink beneath the waves. Jacob had a longer view. He anchored his soul to a stone, which he called the “house of God”: it helped him find his way back home and to escape oppression.
The writer to the Hebrews spoke of an anchor of the soul that extends beyond the veil. A life so anchored on a rock that cannot be moved and a beacon that rises above the clamor of life, is a sure stone, a precious cornerstone. Within the security of such an anchor, we just don’t need to try so hard and so can play our natural game, being what God purposed us to be, to hit without beating the air. That is a vital key to our own effectiveness.
When we look around, we sink, wallow, succumb to my own self-criticism and negatively compare my performance against others. But when we allow Jesus to be our compass, He leads us along paths we have not been before (Joshua 1) to bring us back to the Father. The Father will cast off our rags, clothe us as sons, place His ring on our finger (seal of approval) and anoint us for effective living within His house: to close the wounds opened by our natural fathers and enable us to live abundant lives.
“There is a green hill far away, upon a lonely hill, where the dear son of God was crucified, who died to save us all”. I point you back to a lonely, windswept, forgotten hill – there you will find your soul and the healing that you so need. Everything else is sinking sand.
(c) Peter Eleazar at www.bethelstone.com
My son was 3 when he learnt to fight back – “Mom, he hit me”. In reply she said: “We don’t tell on our brother unless he is danger”. 5 minutes later he was back: “Mom my brother’s in danger”. “Why is he in danger, son?” - “Because he hit me”. Now my two sons play other games, like “He has been on that video game at least one whole lifetime longer than I have”. Soon they may need sneakers, shades and a cell-phone just to qualify for the game of life.
Of course we “grow up” and our games become more subtle - we usually replace conflict with cosmetic or symbolic things to enhance our actual or perceived status.
The $trillion cosmetics industry proves how desperately we need to be more than we are. We enlarge breasts … well women do anyway, but barely has the silicon set before they complain that men are looking at them.
Others go to great lengths to shorten their skirts and then work as hard to keep them down to their knees. Men have their ups and downs too … a colleague recently bought a costly BMW X5, so I asked him “if you drive your house, what do you live in?” … “In a shack” he answered.
Confucius pondered these things and observed how "men will lose their health to make money and then lose their money to restore their health. They will think anxiously about the future and forget the present, such that they live neither for the present nor the future and live as if they will never die, and then die as if they had never lived..... "
Nowhere is this more true, than for those who get to the top to find that someone else has done better than them – reducing their success to no success at all, partly because they can’t recognize success for what it is, but mainly because they had no objective measure of success to start with.
The key is to have an internal frame of reference.
Customer value is a valid yardstick or frame of reference for business success, yet firms still tend to measure their successes in terms of competitors’ achievements. “We have 25% market share … so hey, hey” … as though that’s enough. And the competitor then gets to define what we should be doing, not our customers.
Similarly individuals use their neighbors as a frame of reference – they feel okay as long as another seems worse off - or they compare themselves negatively and slip into a slavish pattern of living to everyone else’s standards … a dead-end.
Without a reference point, many will even become “technically successful” but miss the moment as it passes – rather becoming sick, psychotic or suicidal – another dead-end.
And then there are those who succeed by all external measures – but having conquered everything, they die of stress anyway and pass it all to their children to stress about … and in that one brief moment they finally achieve an elusive sense of family unity and purpose – their children even remember them and find something nice to say … but it’s a dead end anyway.
Okay … So how can you develop an internal frame of reference or homing mechanism?
In terms of sport I have taught my boys, two things. Keep your eye on the ball and don’t try too hard. As soon as someone is watching them, they try too hard, lift their heads and beat the air, so I take them back to basics and in no time they are fine again. In the same way you need to keep your eye on your personal values, priorities and objectives – so you can have a point of reference to guide your decisions and measure your achievements.
Peter’s idea of keeping his eye on the ball amounted to fixing his eyes on Jesus so that he did not sink beneath the waves. Jacob had a longer view. He anchored his soul to a stone, which he called the “house of God”: it helped him find his way back home and to escape oppression.
The writer to the Hebrews spoke of an anchor of the soul that extends beyond the veil. A life so anchored on a rock that cannot be moved and a beacon that rises above the clamor of life, is a sure stone, a precious cornerstone. Within the security of such an anchor, we just don’t need to try so hard and so can play our natural game, being what God purposed us to be, to hit without beating the air. That is a vital key to our own effectiveness.
When we look around, we sink, wallow, succumb to my own self-criticism and negatively compare my performance against others. But when we allow Jesus to be our compass, He leads us along paths we have not been before (Joshua 1) to bring us back to the Father. The Father will cast off our rags, clothe us as sons, place His ring on our finger (seal of approval) and anoint us for effective living within His house: to close the wounds opened by our natural fathers and enable us to live abundant lives.
“There is a green hill far away, upon a lonely hill, where the dear son of God was crucified, who died to save us all”. I point you back to a lonely, windswept, forgotten hill – there you will find your soul and the healing that you so need. Everything else is sinking sand.
(c) Peter Eleazar at www.bethelstone.com
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