Stop living for results

Excerpt from Let Food be Thy Gift

Stop living for results

We are not designed to live life to get results. Life is not a result. Life is living how we are designed to daily nourish our whole person with truth, beauty, dreams, exercise, passions, good thoughts, physical nutrients and love. If we deprive the spirit, heart, mind or body to get a specific result, then we will make up for that deprivation somewhere, somehow and someway.
Trying to just get results forces us to live in contradictions and denies us the opportunities and experiences of satisfying our basic needs. The mind is starving for truth and we try to fill it up with and more useless information. The body is starving for nutrients and we try to fill it up with junk food. The heart is starving to be heard and we ignore it. The spirit is starving to be known and accepted. Yet, we stay in places and online where we can never be known.

But…What have been the real results of living to get results?
We are constantly filling ourselves up but we’re always hungry.
We are more connected but we’re completely disconnected.
We are full of information but we are more confused than ever.
We work harder but we still don’t have enough.
Our kids are involved in more activities but they still don’t know who they are or what to do.
We are busier and more entertained, and we are bored out of our minds.
We know more about more people and we don’t know them at all.
We call more people friends but we are lonely for real friendship.
We have more drugs and healthcare but 88% of us have diet-related disease and sickness.
We have bigger houses and mega churches and less community.
We have more diets and gyms but we have epidemic rates of obesity.
We have more grocery stores and less local organic foods.
We have more time to talk and less real conversation.
We have more knowledge and less wisdom.
We have more drinking and less real celebration.
We have more religion and less hope, truth and love.
We have more things to make us happy and less joy.
We have more politics and greater divisions of wealth, power, resources and relationships.
We have more schools and less learning.
We have more platforms to communicate and yet no one hears our voice.
We have more room to create and less creativity.
We have so much more but we have so much less.
WHY?
Because we are so busy living to get bigger and better results to live bigger and better lifestyles that we do not nourish our hearts, mind, bodies, spirits and relationships. We have worked hard to get the results but results don’t fill us up with truth, love, hope, joy and peace. We may love results but results cannot love us back. It is time for a different way. It is time for us to remember who we are and how we are not designed to be used to get a result and to not use ourselves, others and our world to get results. It is time to Give Up living for results and remember how we are designed to be nourished as whole people with all life’s gifts.

“The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves.”
― Alan Wilson Watts