I’ve been reading Michael Hyatt again, the recently-former CEO of Thomas Nelson Publishing, who wrote this week about the Benefits of Playing it Full Out, which both challenged and slightly discouraged me.  The ideas have been spinning around in my head for a few days, and I wanted to share a few of those thoughts with you.

I interpret the phrase “playing it full out” to mean to hold nothing back, pushing through until you’re spent, and then pushing through some more.  Playing it full out, Michael writes, looks like:

• Being fully present, undistracted by anything else.
• Stretching yourself, even if it makes you feel awkward or uncomfortable.
• Giving it your best effort, even when you are tired and want to quit.

Great advice, particularly from a middle-aged man who has just retired from his extremely successful day-job to have time to pursue his side-work (writing and speaking) full time.  And truly, it is great advice with great rewards.  But.

But what does this look like to a woman in her early (very early, thank you very much) 40s with two increasingly active children and an increasingly busy full time job and an increasing level of chronic pain and illness that knocks me on my butt for days on end?  It is, after all, the million dollar question—is it not?  How do you live full out when life is full of irreducible limits?

The best I can come up with at this point in my life is this:

• Playing it full out for Lorie Kaufman Rees looks different right now than it does for Michael Hyatt, or Donald Miller, or Lauren Winner, or Leslie Leyland Fields, or Shauna Niequist, or any number of other writers I admire.  We’ve all been dealt a different hand.  And we all play those hands out differently.
• That differently, for me, looks like fitting those three principles into the life I currently am living and nurturing them there, rather than trying to make my life something its not.

This takes prayer.  Prayer that I can be fully present—with the children, with my husband, with the writing—each in its own trust-growing window of opportunity.  Prayer that I can continue to stretch beyond that which is comfortable—little me, who is steadfastly committed to comfort—over, and over, and over again.  And prayer that I can give my best effort—when I’m tired, when I’ve worked 12 or 14 hours and I’m spent, which my head is full of green gunk and I can’t breathe let alone think, when I’ve been to physical therapy the fourth time in a week for someone else, when I don’t even have time to work out myself.

Because when I’m honest, I get tired.  And when I get tired, I sometimes kinda-sorta want to quit.  I think, “what was I thinking?”  And then people who love me say unloving things like, “Well, you chose this,” which is code for, “Quit complaining about how hard this is and how little time you have—I’m sick of hearing about it.  What did you expect?”  And I want to throw in the towel and say, “Screw this.  I will be a chauffeur and answer phones at the middles school office and grade papers for second grade and will increase my hours again at work to make ends meet and at least someone in my life will be happy.”  But it sure as heck won’t be me.

Cameron Conant writes, in The Year I Got Everything I Wanted: A Spiritual Crisis, “I’m willing to try and make more than a living; I’m willing to make a life.  That’s why I want to write for a living, because when I write, I feel that I’m doing something I was made to do, not trying to run a program that my operating system doesn’t run.”

When I went on a week-long writing retreat for the very first time, I felt I had come home.  I felt I was “doing something I was made to do.”  It was the happiest and most fulfilled I’d felt since I’d left singing professionally.  It is the life I want desperately to make for myself.

But the life that I have—a life that I also cherish—continues to be in conflict with the life I desire to lead.  I don’t know how to make the two congruent.  nd I don’t know what “Playing it Full Out” looks like in either, let alone both.

“A man’s heart plans his way,” I am reminded, “but the Lord directs his steps.” (Proverbs 16:9)  I am desperate for this direction—step by step, hour by hour, day by day.  Do I go lay down right now, after the sedating effect of my new “peace pill” has kicked in, or do I push through and write loopy, drug-inspired sentences that don’t make sense?  Do I sit on the couch with my husband tonight, knowing I will be gone until Friday, watching a movie I’m vaguely interested in but wishing I were doing something more productive, simply because that will appease him?  It’s the little decisions that add up to big effects, I know.  But which effects?  And at which cost to others?

I can only pray Lord, direct these feeble steps.  I can see where I want to be—where you clearly point out to me I am meant to be heading—but I can’t see for the life of me how I’m going to get there.  How you are going to get me there.

There is a life you have planned for me—a life where full-out makes sense within the entire scope of my world and where full-out is not code for striving but code for cooperating with your operation in my life.  I want to live THERE.

Would you show me the way.

courage family life inspiration motherhood overload parenthood spiritual trust writing