Is there any activity in your life you’ve spent 10,000 hours practicing?
I ask because I was watching a tennis match on TV recently and one of the commentators said experts have determined it takes 10,000 hours of practice to perfect a skill like hitting a tennis ball.
No wonder I never made it to Wimbledon.
I think the only things I’ve consistently done for 10,000 hours are sleep, eat, breathe and blink.
Doing math usually brings on symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder for me, but that sportscaster’s statement motivated me to do some calculating. And by my calculations, I’ve lived more than a half-million hours, which means I’ve had plenty of time to perfect something.
Sadly, it seems like I’m a long way from perfect across the board in my life. (Thankfully, God’s definition of “perfect” is different, but that’s a topic for another day.)
If I live to be 85, I may have just over 160,000 awake hours left, which means that theoretically, I still have time to perfect 16 new skills. Frankly, thinking about that makes me feel like I’m being slammed to the sand by a giant wave of stress. It wears me out to be constantly bombarded with information about what I could do, what I should do, what needs to be done, and what everybody else is doing.
Am I doing enough? Am I giving enough? Am I achieving enough? So many needs, so many voices, so many demands.
I don’t know how you deal with it, but the only way I can sort through it all is to go to God as the child I am and simply pray, “What do You want me to do?”
That one question has rescued me many times when I’ve been drowning in a sea of stress.
Asking that simple question could have saved one woman in the Bible a somewhat embarrassing legacy. Her name was Martha, half of the most famous sister act in the Bible—Martha and Mary. Jesus, a dear family friend, stopped by their house one day, and we’re given an account of that visit in Luke 10.
We don’t know Martha’s last name, but it may have been Stewart, based on the way she fretted about getting dinner on the table. Sister Mary, on other hand, simply sat there and listened to Jesus talk. When Martha complained about not getting any help in the kitchen, Jesus gently rebuked her and commended Mary for doing the one thing He really wanted them both to do.
The one thing. I like that. One thing sounds refreshing and do-able.
Martha assumed Jesus wanted a great meal, but what He really wanted was for her to sit still and listen. If Martha had just asked, “What do You want me to do, Jesus?,” she could have saved herself a lot of work, stress and embarrassment.
That’s true for me, too.
I can spend thousands of hours practicing things I will never perfect, or I can simply begin every day by asking God, “What do You want me to do?”
One path usually leads to frustration; the other to a life well lived in the eyes of the One whose opinion matters most.
Seeking and obeying God may not get me to Wimbledon … or Carnegie Hall … or the French Riviera, but in the end, it will get me somewhere infinitely and gloriously better.
“But the Lord answered and said to her, ‘Martha, Martha, you are worried and bothered about so many things; but only one thing is necessary, for Mary has chosen the good part, which shall not be taken away from her.’” (Luke 10:41-42)