The Lie of the Easy

   "Nothing is fast, quick, or easy unless you are going downhill." Sitting in Freedom Hall, in the midst of thousands of people, I felt like John Maxwell was speaking directly to me. It was as if he had just said, "Ashley, NOTHING is fast, quick, or easy, unless you are going downhill." This simple phrase spoke volumes of what I had been so deeply contemplating lately. You see, things in my life have been crazy lately. I have been working, going to nursing school (which is enough to drive someone insane by itself), and doing a million other things trying to build my future, and sometimes I wonder if i'm doing the right thing.
   I question myself because, due to my generation and culture, I have the tendency to think that anything that happens to you should be easy, quick, painless even. That's the problem with this generation, most of us think that we should spend our college years taking things easy, be handed a diploma, walk into the job of our choice, and easily reside in the suburbs, with our high-school sweet hearts and two children we strategically planned to have exactly 5 years after marriage and 2 years apart. Oh, and to top it all off, we should be debt-free and comfortable with a minivan and leisure car of our choice.
   And so, our generation buys into the "lie of the easy", and we second-guess ourselves when we have to even remotely put in work into anything. Even prior to the conference, I had a conversation with a friend who spoke about how she knew things were right in her life because everything was easy. This made me wonder, should everything be this hard? Should I be this busy? Is working this hard going to be worth it?
   Then, John Maxwell said that phrase, and everything made sense. Think about what happens when you go downhill. You aren't meeting any resistance, and in fact your speed accelerates. The opposite is true when you are going uphill. It is a lot tougher trying to get to the top of a mountain than it is coming down from it. And do we think about where downhill leads? It usually leads to a valley, or a pit. Metaphorically speaking, is that where we want to be in our lives? Yes, we may think that the easy way will lead us to our goals, but does it really? Every time we refuse to work for something, where does that lead us? I think it leads us one step away from where we really want to be. Think back to the example I talked about earlier, with the suburbs and minivan.  There is nothing wrong with wanting that, but how would we really feel with all that just handed to us? Would we be happy, or would we be like so many other Americans, and be empty, sad, burdened with debt, and not living the life we wanted. Think about this on the other hand, what if you spent your college years working hard, worked for your dreams, and worked your way into the job, position, or role that you wanted? What if you saved your money to buy a house, and maybe you did not have everything when everybody else did, but you put your money back to have a better life later on. What if you took your time to find the right spouse? Maybe you were not always in a relationship, but you took time and found the right person to spend your life with? What if you worked to make that relationship the best that it could be? Think of how much better all of this would make our future! With a little hard work now, and not sacrificing the permanent on the altar of the temporal, we could have a life that is actually meaningful and rewarding.
   If we took a step back and really considered what even a little bit of work could do, maybe we would stop believing in this "easy lie". Taking a step back made me realize that, yes, things are really diffficult right now, but each moment I spend staying up late studying, when everyone else my age I know is out at the movies, is a moment that i'm using to build my future. This taking a step back just made me realize that in order to get where I want to be, I'm going to have to intentionally take steps to build my future. Nothing great in life that we want is going to just be handed to us. It is like that Hunter Hayes song that says, "I don't want good and I don't want good enough...I don't want easy, I want crazy." In order to get great, and not just good enough, things won't be easy. In fact, it just might be a little crazy.