“Insanity is doing the same things over and over but expecting different results.”
- George Patton
Habits compounded over time become your life.
January is a time of goal setting and habit forming in my life. Bad habits such as diet choices, inconsistent exercise, and poor sleep patterns are issues I have been battling my adult life. I believe the secret to living a life that is fully alive is as simple as forming life-giving habits and breaking life-taking habits that only bring death and darkness.
This year I set goals for things as simple as brushing and flossing my teeth twice a day to complex goals such as launching a new minsitry in the church.
Last year I tried an experiment that I will never try again. I decided to make a goal to not have any goals and see how life played out. Dumb! Don’t try it. It was a stupid idea!
Habits formed over a lifetime eventually become who we are, not necessarily who we were created to be. Psalm 139:16 states, “Your eyes saw my unformed body. All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.” Knowing this is true I have been asking God an extremely challenging question, “Father, who did you mean who you made me? Who was I created to be?” Warning: Do not ask this question unless you are REALLY ready for the answer!
When I measure the answers to the questions I ask against I begin to see a correlation or pattern between the man I am and the man I am meant to be. In other words, I can weigh my current situation against who I believe God ordained me to be. From this perspective I can measure this distance between the two points, so to speak, in order to chart a course of personal growth.
A great example of this happened a few weeks ago as my son Darby and friend, Chris Gubrud, went duck hunting on the Fanning property. Doug (Fanning) has been planting this field with corn for years and only allows a select group of men to hunt it, one of which is me! Last year the pond never got hunted, and we were the first to hunt it this season. Doug’s pond only shoots two or three weekends a year when Salt creek floods its banks into the corn field, so when Doug called I knew it was good news. The recent rains had saturated the ground causing the creek to flood into the field making the water levels perfect. As Darby, Chris and I sat in the gray twilight listening to the sounds of literally thousands of ducks landing all around us and wing beats near eye level it was enough to drive any man insane with anticipation!
The shoot that day was amazing; except for the sad fact I could not hit anything. Frustrated, I kept banging away but never adjusted my swing, consequently continuing my missing spree. It wasn’t until burning about a box of shells that I realized that to keep doing what I had been doing all morning would mean getting the same results that I had been getting. I finally adjusted my swing and ended one bird short of a limit due to the fact I adjusted my fire too late.
“Insanity is doing the same things over and over but expecting different results.” Insanity does not adjust its fire even though missing the target. Insanity keeps banging away at life praying for a change. Insanity digs a pit that it never climbs out of. Passivity is the character flaw that creates the cycle of insanity.
A life of insanity is one that acknowledges its shortcomings, failures and habits of death, yet fails to adjust in order to change those negative habits. A man must ask himself, “Where do I need to adjust my fire so that my life begins to hit this moving target we call life?”
