Running Away

“Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence? If I go up to the heavens, you are there; if I make my bed in the depths, you are there. If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea, even there your hand will guide me, your right hand will hold me fast.”

- Psalm 139:7-10 NIV

The twin evils in life which most often limit success are running away and not showing up. By “running away”I mean any type of avoidance behavior, and frequently when someone isn’t showing up they are in fact running away. Calling in sick when you have an important meeting at work is often running away from your responsibilities.

Moving to another city to change your life is often nothing more than trying to run away from yourself. The problem with this is that, because our problems often stem from our own personalities, they are portable. That is, wherever we go, we take ourselves with us, and thus when people move, or change jobs, or change relationships, they often find that the same problems—or at least the same types of problems—tend to recur. So what are we to do? We can’t change our personalities. They are well-settled by the time we’ve reached adulthood. The only thing to do is to face our problems head on and deal with them the best we can.

Throughout our lives we must adjust. And while those adjustments may seem like tinkering at the edges rather than wholesale changes, as long as we aren’t running away we can feel confident that we are meeting life’s challenges.

– Christopher Simon