03/07/2023
At the ripe young age of 55, I have been assessing my life and wondering how I got here instead of there. How did I become the person I am now, and am I pleased with whom I have become?
Call it a mid-life crisis, but I like to think of it as a mid-life checkpoint. What are the habits, actions, commitments, and decisions that led me to be the current version of myself, and what changes can I make to move forward, most importantly, on the path God desires me to travel?
I invite you to do the same—whether you are 25, 85, or somewhere in between. As you look back over your life, accept the fact that you did not just become who you are overnight. Your physical, emotional, and spiritual health is a direct result of multiple habits, actions, commitments, and decisions made over many years.
You did not just wake up one day and go from a size six to a size twelve. You didn’t become a manager, teacher, musician, pharmacist, or bi-lingual overnight. Who you are today is a result of years of incremental and often unnoticeable changes. Therefore, if you want to change any part of your life over the years to come, you will need to develop new daily commitments, routines, and habits in your life.
In Atomic Habits, James Clear uses the analogy of an ice cube sitting on a table in a room cooled to 25 degrees. Ever so slowly, the room begins to heat up. 26 degrees. 27. 28. 29. 30. The ice cube seems unchanging, clinging to its frozen state. 31 degrees. Still, nothing has happened. Then, 32 degrees, and all of a sudden, the ice begins to melt. “A one-degree shift, seemingly no different from the temperature increases before it, has unlocked a huge change” (20).
Clear goes on to say, “Breakthrough moments are often the result of many previous actions, which build up the potential required to unleash a major change” (idem.).
The problem is our impatience with the change process. Habits and routines appear to make no difference until you cross a critical threshold, and that threshold is often delayed. And so, what do we do? We give up. We think to ourselves, Well, I gave it a try, and it didn’t work. So, I’m done. We may have quit at 31 degrees, and all we had to do was hold on for one more degree shift.
If we hold on, carry on, and persevere, we will break through the plateau and begin to experience the return on our investment of time, energy, prayer, and consistency. As Clear writes, “Change can take years—before it happens all at once” (ibid., 21). Eugene Peterson calls this “a long obedience in the same direction.” Jesus says, “He who is faithful in little will be faithful in much” (Luke 16:10).
I used to think that I wanted to be a “success.” I wanted to preach in a large church. I wanted to be a published author. I wanted to plant churches that make disciples who make disciples. There is nothing wrong with those goals, but the older I get, the more I realize that my focus shouldn’t be on those outcomes but on the inputs of how I live my life day by day in the small decisions, routines, and habits I form. We are to take up our cross daily (Luke 9:23) and follow Jesus, and that begins with the small decisions and habits we form to develop a joy-filled, long obedience in the same direction.
Jacob Riis once wrote, “When nothing seems to help, I go and look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock, perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that last blow that did it—but all that had gone before” (idem.).
Decide today what new habits you want to form, and then just keep swinging the hammer.
