Embrace Inconvenience

If you want your life to matter, if you want to make a meaningful contribution, if you want to excel in your work,  or want to become a certain kind of person, prepare to embrace inconvenience.  We're becoming more programmed as a society to make choices based on convenience.  If something is easy, simple and less inter-ruptive, it's better and thus the logical choice.  If something requires more of us,  is costly or time consuming, then that option is less desirable and thus to be avoided.


Think of someone you know who has made a meaningful contribution to the world.  If you were to ask that person to describe what it has taken to make the contribution he or she has made, you would undoubtedly hear stories of sacrifice, personal cost, and inconvenience.

Yesterday as I was flipping through radio channels while driving, I just caught the tail end of someone saying, "Place your kid in the farthest school possible, and then personally drive him or her to and from school every day because those conversations you will have in the car will become some of your most treasured memories."  How inconvenient, but true.

You can imagine us piling into our mini van every week for the drive

This made me think about our family. For the past year and a half, we have been piling into our van every Sunday to drive 40 minutes one way to attend church services.  When we first started, the amount of conflict we had to endure during those drives was staggering. "You're seat is back too far", "I don't have enough room", "Why do I always have to sit in the back" (if no one was there) or "It's my turn to sit in the back" (if someone was already there). At times Charles and I would look at each other and wonder why we were doing this to ourselves.

It was hard at first (actually for quite a while), but you know what?  The inconvenience of that drive has ended up being such a gift. I have seen our family grow closer together over the past year and a half, and while the weekly drive isn't the entire reason, it's certainly been part of what has helped us to grow closer because the drive forced us  to learn how to talk and relate to each other for longer periods of time than we were used to.

Don't rule something out just because it's inconvenient.  Embracing inconvenience for all of the right reasons is necessary to grow, expand, develop and become all we were meant to be.