I’m not a huge NASCAR fan.  But what I do know about racing is that professional drivers spend much more time maintaining their cars than they actually do racing them.  If not maintained, it will fall apart, crash, and kill the driver.  The unexamined car is not worth racing.

About a month ago my friend Won recommended a Mark Driscoll talk which sort of rocked my world.  In it he talks about how most of us spend all our time working in our lives when we ought to spend much more time working on our lives.

Now through most of December I’ve been thinking about that talk, and how I spend too much time staying busy, and not enough time working on what’s really important.  Then one morning, a few days before Christmas, I was reading Proverbs and suddenly a light went on in my head.

It’s your life!

Proverbs is a collection of sayings by the wisest man that ever lived.  There seems to be a common idea throughout.  That is that wise, principled living brings life, and foolish living brings death.  For example…

“Keep my commands and you will live…” (4:4)

“Hold on to instruction…guard it well, for IT IS YOUR LIFE.”  (4:13)

It says things like this over and over again.  I interpret it this way: it’s your life.  Your one and only life.  It’s all you have.  It’s a gift.  It’s yours to manage.  Don’t squander it, don’t reck it, don’t waste it.  It is your life.  Examine it.  Maintain it.

It hit me kind of like a race car would if you were standing on the track.  I’ve been racing, but haven’t worked on my car.  What’s wrong with me?!

So I’ve been spending the past week writing down some ideas and principles, and trying to figure things out.  I’m not going to make any overly ambitious resolutions this year.  But I am resolving to work on my life in 2009 (not just in it).

Working in

That’s flight mode.  Caffeine.  To-do lists.  Appointments.  Errands, tasks, projects.  Phone calls.  Events.  Entertainment.  Work.  Promotion.  Harnessing opportunities and shooting for the stars…  Rinse and repeat.  I’m exhausted already.

Working on

Breathe…

Alone.  Reflection.  Prayer.  Quiet.  Learning.  Developing good habits.  Health.  Eating well.  Exercise.  Planning.  Ingraining principles deep within my thinking.

How all this is going to work, I don’t know yet.  I do know I’m going to have to say no to some things, and maybe get up a little earlier.  I also know I’m going to have to make some plans, set some personal goals, etc.

I’ll close this metaphor with a few questions for your consideration.  How can more time working on make you more affective on the working in?  In what ways could you be working on your life that you aren’t now?

My mind soon turned back to Christmas and I thought of the manger, the first crib of baby Jesus. It was a feeding trough for animals, probably full of filth and excrement. I imagined the resourceful young Joseph, dumping it out and wiping it down with a cloth, finding the cleanest hay possible. Here, Mary. It’s the best I can find.

This is how Jesus was born.

I am amazed.

I looked down the street and observed that gradually people were emerging from the buildings. But something was strange about them, much like the buildings themselves. They had abstract features, like surrealist art. Distorted somehow. Human, yet not. Moving, yet not alive. Disoriented creatures, like shadows of mad men, manifestations of an indescribable nightmare. Screeching glass was pleasant compared to the sounds they made. Fear gripped me as hundreds of them poured onto the streets like roaches with the lights off.

I started to run. I had to get away. But in dreams, sometimes you don’t run in the right direction. I ran through the streets, maneuvering, dodging the human shells, when I suddenly found myself surrounded.

Then, like a narration in a movie, when everything pauses so the omnipotent storyteller can insert his one line, I heard a voice. No one around me was saying it. It was just there. And it said this: It is like a man who looks in a mirror and immediately forgets what he looks like.

Finally I found a street where these beings were not swarming. There was a glimmer of hope at the end, like a ray of sunlight. The mob of demons dispersed as I walked, and I soon spotted a gate. Then, like the eye of a storm that appears unanticipated, the horrible people were gone. The rays of a morning sunrise illuminated the sky on the other side of the gate, and I walked through it and into the light, at last feeling safe.

I gasped awake, heart pounding through my chest. Incoherent in the early morning, I lacked confidence that I was among the real. Anxious and on edge, I stumbled out of bed and into the bathroom, afraid one of those creatures could be lurking in my hallway. The shower restored my confidence and brought me into reality. I was awake.

But I could not stop thinking about the dream. It terrified me. Even more so, it baffled me. The voice I had heard paraphrasing an obscure biblical passage. It is like a man who looks in a mirror and immediately forgets what he looks like…

I got ready and had a few minutes before I had to leave for school. I pulled out a Bible and sat at my desk and turned to the book of James. I read the verse that had intruded my dream, “…if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man looking at his own face in a mirror; for he looks at himself, goes away, and right away forgets what kind of man he was.”

I pondered for a moment what the dream could mean, when suddenly it hit me. I gasped, like someone breaking the surface of the water, and tears began to well up inside. I had it figured all wrong. It was worse than I could have imagined. The creatures were not actually chasing me. I was one of them.

Let’s be honest for a second.  Facing and overcoming your fear is hard.  I think if I was Bruce Wayne, I would have dismissed my fear with excuses. This isn’t me. I don’t like bats. Forget it!  I’m doing something else. But Bruce chose to face his fear, embrace it, overcome it. Beyond that, he chose to become what he feared.

How natural, how comfortable it is, to lean on your excuses, to dismiss something you fear, say this isn’t me, and move on.  The question invoked in my mind from the image of Bruce Wayne is this: What could we become if we embraced our fears? What would our lives be like if we chose not to be afraid?