Wednesday, January 12, 2011

Epic

Can we live epic consciously? Or is it something that just happens around us and sucks us in without warning?

That's something I've been thinking about a lot lately. The men and women who fought in World War II must have had some idea of the magnitude they were living. But at the same time, all of those battles and heroic gestures were simply the result of regular choices. The eyes of history see the epic decisions, but did the eyes of the present?

I want to live an epic life. But I seem to get bogged down in the presentness of it all sometimes. I know what the good decisions are most of the time, but it's so much easier to choose something else. I should get up earlier, work out more, eat better, have a training schedule set for all of the skills I want to hone: shooting, running, rescue, nursing. I should be a machine. A machine with empathy and gentleness and wisdom and all of these other things that I do not possess enough of. Unfortunately, I'm human. And my humanness makes me tired. Machines don't get tired. The machine schedule I feel pressured to enact gets confounded by my humanity and this thing called life that keeps happening around me. But at the same time, I know that machines don't live epics. Humans do. Humans who make choices. Every. Single. Day.

1 comment:

Lee Ann said...

Living out our humanness without shame is so hard . . . I think it can only happen when we realize how much God loves us exactly for who we are, with all our human failures.

By the way, you are quite an amazing human. Please don't become a machine!