Practicing The Right Stuff

when we want to work on what we can already do.

Whenever I was still a young music student in college I remember walking into the music building on campus, making my way to the practice room, and then easily opening up my music and “practicing” the sections I could already play with ease. The further I went into my schooling, the more I did this very thing. I would go into the practice room, and I would walk out 2 hours later feeling pretty accomplished. What I was doing, really, was fooling myself.

While it seemed as though I was being productive, I was actually just lulling myself into a state of stagnation, blissfully unaware that my progress wasn’t real.

Now that I am older, I realize that I have a tendency to do this with all sorts of things. Whenever I get into my car to drive to work, I’m not thinking about how to always be a better driver. I passed my driving test long ago, so that means I know it all!

Whenever I get to work, am I always working on being better than I was the day before? The honest answer most of the time is no.

Whenever I sit down to write to each of you, do I always obsess over every word? No—and some of you can probably tell.

As a husband, do I always try to be better for the sake of my family? Again, the honest answer is no.

The truth is that most of us are busy, and we are just trying to get by. We don’t seem to have time to always work on being better every single day. And perhaps that is a testament to our modern era.

We have everything we could ever need, so much so that we don’t ever doubt that there will be food for us at the store. We simply leave the house, and all of our favorite foods and drinks await us on the other side of those sliding doors at the store.

What I often fail to see in my own life is how little my faith is. If I even grasped half of God’s love for me, would I still remain the same man I that I was yesterday? Would my patience for my neighbors not be the slightest bit altered? Would I not have much more of a desire to love those around me—and really love them?

We often walk into church and read our Bibles with the same deadly presupposition that I carried with me into the practice room. We focus on our overall view of ourselves in our walks with Christ. We fail to take a closer look at the parts of our hearts that make us uncomfortable. Instead of really working on the smaller, and often obscured, parts of ourselves that we need to work on in order to grow in love, we often go into a sort of mental autopilot mode, going through the motions.

Work on loving people better. You might find that it’s a lot easier when you think about what Christ did for you.