I love golf. I’m not good at it, but there’s something about spending four hours in nature with friends that always gets me very excited! Like, so excited I find it hard to sleep the night before. Often I wake up at 4 AM, panicking, because I’m sure I missed our tee time.
This summer my boys have gotten into golf. There’s been a lot of evenings and weekends where I brought my golf bag down to the yard to play with them. It’s been a lot of fun to play together but one thing I’ve been very aware of this summer is how heavy my golf bag is.
It’s my fault, typically I keep about 75 to 100 golf balls in my bag. I do this because that’s the only place I know to put them but it’s way more than I would ever need to play a round of golf. This weekend I got so fed up with lugging my bag up and down the hill between our garage and our yard that I finally removed some golf balls from my bag.
I found a container to hold all the extra golf balls that were in my bag and as I worked it got me thinking about excess in our lives.
Excess is a funny thing, we tend to want it as humans but then when we get it, it doesn’t satisfy us. If we have too much of something, it means there’s not room in our life for the best things. My golf bag has been so stuffed with golf balls that the last time somebody gave me a pack of Pro V1s (The nicest golf balls you can get) I had to search for a place to squeeze them in.
Excess works the same way, it keeps us from being able to keep the best and most important things on our plate. Excess weighs us down and robs the joy of being content with what we have in the moment and the provision that will come in the future. It is hard to hold more when our hands are already too full.
It takes time, and energy to care for excess and that is time and energy that could be put into caring for the most important things. Like a garage so full of junk you can’t park a car in it, excess eats up space that could be used for what we value most.
The funny thing was that as I freed myself from the weight of the golf balls I didn’t need, fear was talking to me pretty loudly. It was asking in a panicked voice: “What if you need them?”. My only response, was to chuckle, knowing that I would not need them anytime soon. Excess is often driven by fear, and fear is always a master that weighs us down.
This week, where can you let go of some excess so that you have space, time, and room for the absolute best things in your life. When your plate is freed from second best, there is then there is room for the very best!
In your corner,
Matt