Give Up Your Day Job…
…and while you’re at it, go ahead and give up your car, your 401k, your house, your smart phone, your wardrobe, your vacation, your clean drinking water, your air conditioning, your TV, your 3000 calorie-a-day diet, your electricity, your bank account, your family and your friends.
It’s easy to forget that the majority of the world’s people do not live like us.
Jeffrey Sachs reports in his bestselling book, The End of Poverty, that
…the extreme poor (at around 1 billion people) and the poor (another 1.5 billion people) make up around 40 percent of humanity. Another 2.5 billion people are up yet another few rungs, in the middle-income world, earning a few thousand dollars a year.
A few thousand dollars a year: Not necessarily what we would consider a typical middle-income situation.
Sometimes life truly is difficult, even genuinely painful; but your viewpoint on difficulty is all relative to your current perspective on life. If you want to grow as a humble leader, capable of selflessly serving and helping others, then you must continually challenge your current, status-quo perspective. The status quo is where men and women, once filled with passion and fervor for helping people in need, go for early retirement, waiting for someone to feel sorry for them and reassure them that their lives were not a waste. It’s not about downplaying authentic challenges and discomforts, it’s about changing your perspective on wasteful worrying regarding trivial matters that wouldn’t begin to scratch the surface of the problems facing the majority of the world’s population.
One of the best ways to alter your perspective for the better is to give something up, to make a decisive modification regarding what and how much you consume, to choose more wisely how you use your time, to see people (all people!) with caring, compassionate eyes, to love others as you love your own self, to think about others more than you think about your own self and to genuinely pursue a heart-felt lifestyle consumed with serving and helping other people, loving them, regardless of their circumstances and background, to the fullest extent possible.
Give up everything else. Simplify. Love everybody. In the end, nothing else matters.
4 Comments
I once saw an ad with a picture of an airplane taking off over a slum. Text read: “Flying is not normal.”
How many of the things that we do every day are not normal? Making phone calls, typing responses to blogs, using advanced technology. Our world is terrifying unequal, and we spend most of our lives being unaware of the inequality.
Not only are we unaware of the inequality, but so many of us get caught up in looking forward and above, thinking, “Boy, there are so many things I don’t have.”
We don’t spend near enough time looking behind ourselves and thinking, “Boy, there are just so many things that I do have.”
Robby
Andrew
Thanks for adding to the conversation.
Last night a group of us from Indy Metro Church were able to give away free beds to extremely underpriveledged people living in The Barton Towers (government housing on Mass Ave). I spoke with one gentleman who was obviously very grateful for his new bed. He said that he had been sleeping, in his room, on the floor, ever since he had moved in about 5 weeks prior. Sleeping on a hard, cold, tiled floor, without a bed.
The things I take for granted every day are outstanding. I would never think of sleeping night after night, in my own house, on the floor, unable to afford a clean bed, sans bed bugs, sans clean sheets. It rarely occurs to me that I am surrounded, daily, by people who are desperately in need of love, attention and help. Let’s never forget them. Let’s never stop loving them. Let’s never cast them aside as irregular or \not normal\. So many of the things we consider \normal\ are so irregular it’s laughable.
Thanks for the great thoughts guys.
Thanks Parke for the reminder that giving,loving,caring are always in style.