When I was probably an early teenager, I was visiting my grandmother’s house.
We often did, as my mom would take us there on weekends. Sometimes we’d stay during the week. Probably a way for her to have a break from the kids, and it gave us the chance to do some things. Grandma was a pretty hard woman. She was a farmer’s wife and your livelihood depended on your ability, your willingness to work. So we would go there and she expected us to work more than we wanted to. Well, there was one time she had me mow lawn. So I was out mowing the lawn and I did everything I could do avoid at first. And then when I’m doing it, I’m just, “Oh, I wish I didn’t have to do this. This sucks. I just don’t want to do this.”
Well, my cousins lived in the same town and one of my cousins came by and saw me mowing the lawn., which of course, gave me a reason to stop. So I stopped. And he said, “What’s wrong with you?” Because he could tell I was upset, not happy. I said, “Oh, grandma’s making me mow the lawn.” And he looked at me like, “What is the big deal?” Now he was a farmer’s son too, because they lived in that same small farming community, but he took them over from me. He finished mowing that lawn in probably five minutes. Five minutes. Now I’d done some. It might’ve taken him 10 minutes if he had to do the whole thing. But I had spent probably an hour or an hour and a half making myself miserable, lamenting my lot in life because I was required to mow the lawn by my grandmother before I could go fishing or do whatever else it was that I was looking forward to doing there on the farm. And there were a lot of fun things to go explore too.
I, in that moment, had an epiphany. That was the epiphany. Holy cow. It took him five minutes to mow the lawn, and I’ve been fighting it for an hour. If I had just not fought myself, then I would have been done a long time ago. Well, why am I telling you this story in particular when I’m full of sweat? Because I just got back from a twice-weekly run that I go on. It’s because sometimes the very things we put off doing are more effort putting them off than they are to actually do. You may not like to exercise. You may not like to mow your lawn. You may not like to balance your checkbook and set a spending plan. There are things you may not like to do, but quite often the energy and the effort we put into not doing them is more than the actual effort it would take to do them. So in this sweaty message, I hope maybe you think about that for a minute. What are you putting off? What are you avoiding doing that actually would be less painful if you just did it? Something to think about.