How To Get Yourself Out Of The Rat Race
Everyone of us dream about getting out of the rat race one day. I mean I don’t know of anyone who ever dreams of putting more hours at work or wanting to spend more hours commuting during rush hour. It’s not like we dream of putting in extra hours at work at the expense of family time. So why is it that this dream of escaping the rat race is such a tough hill to climb.
The main problem is that we dream but we keep doing the same thing we did yesterday hoping for a different result. Life in the rat race is a bit like running on the treadmill. The faster you run the more your tire and burn yourself out but when its all said and done you haven’t actually gone anywhere and tomorrow you basically start in the same place again. Sure your fitness improves and you burn of much needed calories but its not like you ran a marathon and finished a race. But lets say you do want to run a marathon one day, eventually you are going to need to get off the treadmill and just join a marathon. How can you ever hope of completing a marathon if you never get out on the road and run the race. Its all great to prepare, it would be ill advised to just wake up one day and run in a marathon, but all the best preparation and training does not compare to actually running the race.
The treadmill is a little like life. We all get so comfortable and used to running the treadmill that we never stop to decide what we are actually wanting to accomplish. What is the marathon of our life in a sense. Is it to one day travel, start and raise a family or maybe spend more time on the water. Whatever it maybe you have to decide what it is for you and you have to decide that you are going to have to get out of the treadmill and just go for it.
We can all get preoccupied with running on the treadmill of life sometimes but you have to remember that you can run as fast as you want, work up stress and sweat but you aren’t actually going anywhere. You have to step out of your comfort zone and do something different if you want the results in your life to change.
I came across this inspirational short movie clip of a guy who quit his job and with the money he saved went traveling around the world for six months until his money ran out. Now that is inspirational. He decided to start a blog and filmed himself dancing at the different countries he visited to keep his friends and family up to date on where and what he was doing.
So if you want to change your experiences and get yourself out of the rat race, the first thing you have to do is decide what race you are running and why you are doing what you are doing in the first place. Once you find meaning you will find purpose.
Terence Young – For more weight loss and personal growth articles visit: http://www.personalgrowthunlimited.com
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Escaping the Rat Race
Since I live in the city I am assaulted with advertisements from the radio, TV and static billboards. I have to skip through commercials before I can watch the DVD I just bought. I almost throw important mail away in my attempts to sift through mountains of junk mail. I endure up-selling every time I buy a cup of coffee or fill up my car with gas. I don’t answer my phone if it’s a number I don’t recognize because I know it’s going to be a telemarketer. Tonight I tried to watch a professional basketball game. Every time out, every statistical report and every inch of the stadium was plastered with ads. What do pool supplies and casinos have to do with basketball? Just ask one of the star players, there he is hosting the ad!
Our sales-driven culture is wearying, especially to economically average people. Sales is not an end in itself, yet many people in the workforce today must adopt Sales as their daily religion. Sales can be a good thing, granted. It springs forth from a potentially healthy, capitalistic model. But the result of our take-take-take mentality is an ever-increasing class of people who do nothing but sales. They are called “Salesmen.” Average folks who would love to do something honest for a living are forced to sell their bosses’ products the other masses who buy the aforementioned products using the revenue they accumulated from commissions earned from selling their respective bosses’ products, and so on.
This is the destructive futility of doing anything apart from God. This also hints at the oppressive tendency of any human system that tries to function apart from God. Godless men are driven by their insecurities to position themselves above others as they try to offset their giving with as much taking as possible.
Work apart from God must be meaningless and therefore also discouraging. If God is not making our work meaningful, then what is our meaning? To earn money? Earn money to spend on what? Feed our families? To what end? So that our families might live? Live for what?
God is continually offsetting our destructive tendencies with His grace. There must be a single, great Giver to offset the fact that men are always taking. Men would tear themselves and the world apart through their hoarding and clinging if not for God, who chooses to patiently hold the world together.
Worldly men would think a man crazy for giving and dying unconditionally so that others might benefit from his giving and dying. God’s otherworldly grace inspires such craziness. This insanity is the only productive way to live. This good kind of insanity offsets the Godless world’s insanity, which is self-destructive.
God makes it possible for men to die to themselves by making them spiritually full. To the heaven-bound man, Jesus Christ is all the nutrition and wealth that he could ever want. Christ is our eternal Wealth. This Wealth is unfading, impossible to steal. The spiritual wealth that comes from knowing Jesus Christ is grounded in God, who is eternally set apart from the world.
Christ makes His followers useful to world by freeing them from worldly concern. He fills them and strengthens them so they might give and die unconditionally, to benefit others.
It is not the race that makes a rat race, but the rats in the race that make it a rat race. God frees us from this rat race by making us something better than rats.
A career of sales, for example, will drain a person’s life. But a salesman who depends on God will accomplish his work with unconditional joy. When God frees a man to work with unconditional dedication and joy, he will do any job well, even a sales job. This demonstrates the ironic beauty of God’s grace. He injects that which was only dark and detrimental with life-renewing hope and strength.
There is hope for our capitalistic economy as long as it contains Godly checks and balances. As long as our money earning is girded by spiritual wisdom and selfless charity there’s a chance for us to find meaning in our everyday lives.
by Patrick Roberts. Find additional resources at www.BooksByPatrick.com
Patrick is an average Christ-seeker. His goal is to turn people to Jesus Christ. www.BooksByPatrick.com
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