“Imagining unborn tomorrows is playing the long game, but it involves an immediacy that is quite different from urgency. Urgency is born of anxiety, while immediacy is born of faith. Faith is prophetic, but it’s not presumptuous. . . . Faith plans for tomorrow, but it doesn’t take tomorrow for granted. It actually lives like there’s no tomorrow.”- Mark Batterson
As Mark Batterson continues Chapter 10 of Win the Day, he connects simple living with durable learning. On July 4, 1845, Henry David Thoreau began a two-year experiment in simple living. He moved into a tiny home on property owned by Ralph Waldo Emerson. The result of Thoreau’s grand gesture? His magnum opus, Walden.
However, as Thoreau communed with nature, his experiment went beyond deliberate practice. Hence, Pastor Batterson refers to it as deliberate living. Thoreau himself described the process:
“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”
For Thoreau, his experiment led to durable learning. Such learning, Mark points out, goes beyond head knowledge. Thus, deliberate learning proceeds from your head to your heart to your gut. It’s the school of hard knocks and centers on convictions, not facts.
In addition, durable learning fuels what Albert Einstein called ‘a holy curiosity.’ For in truth, most of us find ourselves educated way beyond the level of our obedience. As a result, we don’t need to know more. Instead, we need to do more with what we know. That’s the essence of cutting the rope.
Finally, Mark exhorts:
“Durable learning results in core convictions that become your rule of life — the thing that makes you tick, makes you tock. . . . That rule of life encompasses the God-sized goals and the God-ordained passions that push you to become the best version of yourself possible.”
Today’s question: What Scriptures sustain you in playing the long game? Please share.
Tomorrow’s blog: “Every miracle happens twice!”
