Playing the Game

It has been a popular concept in contemporary circles to encourage young professionals, maybe even young people in general; that what they do isn’t an important factor to their personal identity. I think I understand what’s caused this new paradigm shift. It has been a response to a generation saturated with workaholics, whom because of their preoccupation with their occupation missed out on much of the rest of their life. Their families, marriage, health and therefore quality of their work suffered because of this highly imbalanced lifestyle. With this in mind I can see some merit in this popular concept, but I think like most response-driven stances, the pendulum may have swung to far in the opposite direction.

If you would allow me to stack my gapping ignorance due to lack of life experiences on top of my ridiculously inflated sense of idealism and my strong internal drive for perfection for a moment, I would like to explain why I think what we do is the key factor to our personal identity. Being faced with a situation in which I am not able to do what I do seems at this moment to be one of the most incredibly uncomfortable places I have ever found myself. At first I believed it was because I am slightly hyper-active and feel as if I am lost without something to occupy my self in. But as I have tried to fill this abundance of free time with anything I can, I have realized that nothing takes the place of a calling. It is not that I chose to identify myself by what I do, but rather what I do makes me who I am… and I like who I am because I love what I do. I know that my marriage and my health are important but I also think I am a better husband and healthier person when the higher levels of Maslow’s Hierarchy(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow's_hierarchy_of_needs), esteem and self-actualization, are satisfied in my life. If I were to choose to limit my identity to merely getting by I believe that I would be missing out on all the best parts of what it means to be alive. Life without immersing one’s self in gainful and meaningful purpose and service is like driving to Disney World and riding the tram around the parking lot all day and then going home… or at least for me it is like that.

I am afraid for my contemporaries in this generation who have been so encouraged to not be what they have been called to be, but rather just do what they have been called to be. I am afraid that they will never know the full joy of life… that they will never walk through the gates of the Magical Kingdom that is being a minister, but they will settle for the parking lot tram of doing ministry, because we have been told that if we over commit we will burn-out, suffer moral failure, lose touch with the people around us and the people closest to us, and then get kicked out of the game. But that is a totally illogical reason not to play in the first place. For me, knowing how great it was to have it and now feeling like it has been taken away from me for no reason is motivation enough for me to never disqualify, never burn out, and most of all to never taken any of this great privilege for granted again.