What are the hungers of my life and what am I
doing about them? Gordon MacDonald tells about a conversation he had with an
NFL athlete, a friend of his. The football player was an all-pro pass defender,
the best in the business. On a Monday, six days before the team would play
against the Dallas Cowboys, the two men were having lunch together.
Gordon asked him, “So how are you going to
prepare yourself for the Cowboy pass offense? What’s your schedule going to be
this week?”
The player said, “Well, the mornings will all be
practice at the stadium. And then I’ll go home to my den and watch game films.
I’ll study the Cowboy receivers until I know all of them better than their
wives do. I’ll check every movement they make when they come out of the huddles
to see if they reveal what sort of play it’s going to be, what pattern they’re
going to run, or whether or not they’re going to stay back and block.” “So what
about your evenings?” Gordon asked.
“Oh, I’ll keep watching those films straight
through until midnight every night.” “Ten hours a day? All week? Nothing else?”
Gordon was incredulous.
“Yep!” the player said. “Hey, I want to beat
those guys. I want to hit them so hard if they come into my zone that when they’re
lying on the ground, they’ll look up to the sky with glassy eyes and pray that
there won’t have to be another play in the game! I want to totally dominate
their spirits!”
Now that’s what you call passion. The guy is
hungry! He wants to win so badly that he’s willing to do whatever it takes to
get there. One might deny the validity or value of the object of his hunger.
But the spirit of it is undeniable; deep, passionate hunger.
The truth is, we all feel hungers inside us that
motivate us and drive us to action. Passion is a powerful motivational force.
It pushes us to excel in sports, business, academia, arts, relationships and
most areas of life. It moves us to go beyond the ordinary and the status quo.
Hunger.
When MacDonald saw his NFL friend’s hunger and
passion to win something as futile and fading as a simple football game, he was
inwardly embarrassed to realize that there really was no part of his life where
he could say he was paying a similar price. Not in his family life, not in his
work, not even in the part of life that possessed the most significance and value
for him.
It’s ironic that so few people stop long enough
to acknowledge some of their hungers other than the most pressing problem at
the moment. And even when they do, what they do about it is not nearly as deep
and all-consuming as that NFL player.
Henri Nouwen, considered by many to be one of
the greatest spiritual writers, once described a deep inner hunger in our
society that he called “restlessness.” When he returned from an extended stay
in Latin America, he observed: “What most strikes me, being back in the United
States, is the full force of restlessness, the loneliness, and the tension that
holds so many people. The conversations I had today were about spiritual
survival. So many of my friends feel overwhelmed by the many demands made on
them; few feel the inner peace and joy they so much desire. … There seems to be
a mountain of obstacles preventing people from being where their hearts want to
be. It is so painful to watch and experience. The astonishing thing is that the
battle for survival has become so ‘normal’ that few people really believe that
it can be different.” (Nouwen, 2002).
Continued…………….
No comments:
Post a Comment