Above The Line Article:
"Don’t 'Should'
Yourself"
By Erik Carlson
What’s ironic about the fact that the bird gave me
a direct hit on my journal is that I just happened to be
writing about how I sometimes get caught up in doing things
that I think I SHOULD do, just because I think other people
will think that’s what I should be doing.
Here’s the irony: I heard someone in church one time
preach about how we need to not “should ourselves”;
in other words, getting caught up in that life-wasting game
of doing what we think others would want us to be doing.
I actually had just written down “don’t should
yourself” and then…splat… the bird proceeds
to ‘should’ all over my paper.
I guess it was an excrement-ation… I mean, an exclamation
point on the lesson I needed to hear. A perfect example
of this is found in a Wall Street Journal article I read
last week (the one paper I read regularly).
On Friday August 7th, an article on Evelyn Stevens told
of how she stumbled upon a gift even SHE did not know she
possessed. Only a year ago, she was a 50-hour a week Wall
Street associate who liked to jog occasionally, until one
day she bought a bike.
As I write this, she is competing in the Route de France
six-day race that draws some of the world’s top female
cyclists…and she just might win. She is being trained
by a coach who raced against the likes of Lance Armstrong,
who thinks one day she’ll be world champion.
I can just hear it... “You mean you left a prestigious
Wall Street job to ride a bike??” I heard words like
that when I left my post at the Children’s Hospital
as staff Orthotist, to pursue singing in an A Cappella group,
‘Second Glance’. Had I caved into the critics,
I would have missed out on touring Western and Eastern Europe,
recording two Albums, winning grand prize at the Christian
Artists’ talent contest in Estes Park, Colorado, and
singing on the same stage with Rich Mullins (he wrote ‘Awesome
God’), Cathy Tricolli, and other chart-toppers of
the early 90’s.
My encouragement to anybody who needs a bird to get your
attention, (hey… that’s ME!!) is this: Let’s
stop doing what we ‘should’ be doing, and start
listening to that still, quiet voice that knows exactly
what we NEED to be doing. You know what I mean… doing
what we can’t NOT do; pursuing those dreams that we
cannot get out of our minds. I’m up here at Lake Tahoe
on a personal retreat, and this is precisely why I take
these personal retreats; to get a message like this one.
As I have said before, we’re in this together!
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