You Can Only Serve One Master
Reflect upon this carefully: you can only serve one master. Multi-taskers: this means you too! You may be able to wear many hats and dip your toes into many ponds, but at the end of the day there is always the one source that consumes your most effort, your most energy, and your most thinking time. So, think about it: where is your time going? What are you thinking about? In other words, who is your master?
Self as Master - One Example
If you’re anything like me, and I’ll wager in our generation of ‘self-care’ some of you are, you serve yourself–the almighty ego. Worthy of all praise, all worship, and all thanks. We glorify it day and night. We give ourselves thanks and praise for all the good that happens in our life, marveling at just how good we are. “How can any of this be”, we say, “were it not for my tremendous effort and skill.” “I am so gifted, so unique, and so special”. “Without me, this world would be in ruin”. This self-talk, though seemingly parody, is unfortunately very real in a majority of people in these “ME times”. Is it so in you?
It takes a lot of effort and hard-work to swim against the current, to ignore the shift of the tides. “Me” is all the rage right now, the fashion of our culture. If it ain’t for us, than it don’t matter! Things need to work for us. They need to please us. All that matters is our comfort, our happiness, and our general self-satisfaction and self-improvement. “Self-“: how many of our words begin with this prefix? In all things, we are to glorify the self as our almighty deity.
But why Is this so? Who you serve will impact all areas of your life. Think of all the different aspects of your life, though varying wide, what serves as the center of your life will have its hand in all these. For our ego-controlled servant, family time thus becomes more me-time. How are these people adding value to me? Work is all about how it benefits me. What kind of value am I getting from this? Is it more money, more power, more recognition, or perhaps more self-love for accomplishing any of these things? All aspects of life, our master has control of. There is no I without that which I serve. It is my lens in which I view the entirety of the world and my life in it or, the other way around, my life and the world in it.
How do we direct ourselves
Starting Where We’re At
This has to be the question we get at in a conversation like this. To begin, we need to know where it is we’re at. This can be hard for us to be honest about, most masters usually don’t want to blow their cover lest the risk of losing a faithful servant, but it is quite easy to find out who or what it is once we run a simple internal assessment of what drives us the most. While eventually obvious, this can require some deep digging when we are really entrenched in our ways. Most masters we shouldn’t have like to order us around without our full consent. I’d imagine, and really hope, few of us have made overt deals with the devil bargaining our life and soul away. Much more likely, we have consumed a part of the culture and have chosen one of its prescribed masters little by little and step by step until we have completely fallen in its trap. Over time it becomes our master in all aspects of our life and we are not even aware of it. This is why we must start digging to find out what is going on now.
Some Questions to Ask Yourself Are:
What drives me?
Where are my ambitions geared towards?
What do I believe will make me happy?
What is my ‘end game’? My ultimate goal in life?
Uncovering these fundamental answers to your being will uncover who’s in charge. Be honest with yourself. If it is something you are not proud of, the first step to ditching it is admitting to it. Our natural tendency as humans goes towards power, pleasure, honor, and wealth. If you’re here now where would you like to be?
Checking the want ads for a new boss
Given the central role our master takes in our life, we better be at peace with who or what is governing us; in our actions and our motivations. The great roman philosopher Seneca said, “A life left unexamined is not worth living”. I’d say this is fulfilled when we don’t even know what it is we are living for. Do not let your life waste away! Don’t be duped any longer; make a choice. If you don’t like your current deal then you tell your master you quit. Thankfully we are free to make this choice all on our own, and even if we’ve been a loyal servant (reigning servant of the year) up to this point, it is never too late to restart ourselves and begin again under a new covenant. Find a deal that works for you. You deserve it. Look for a new boss, one who will actually serve you too and lead you to being the person you want to be–one who wants your good maybe even more than you do.