I love playing golf. I’m not good at it, but that doesn’t stop me from always practicing, tinkering, and trying to get better. In trying to get better, I recently videoed my swing. I was horrified. It was nothing like the swing I had pictured in my mind, it was nothing like the swing my body assured me that I had by simply feel and it is not the type of swing I ultimately want to have!
So in trying to work through some of the issues that I saw on the video, one issue I wanted to fix was where the low point in my swing was versus where it needed to be. You see in golf when you hit an iron, the club needs to strike the ball first just before it strikes the ground, so the lowest point of the swing is actually in front of the ball.
I’ve always known this fact intellectually, and I’ve always thought my setup position was correct and the problem with my swing was something else I was doing wrong. But after seeing my swing on video, I quickly realized that the low point of my swing was actually behind the ball!
The next time I practiced, I simply made an adjustment that placed the ball slightly farther back in my stance than I had been used to… which brought the low point of my swing to be in front of the ball and bingo! My shots became solid, straight, and pure! A simple adjustment of where I needed to be relative to the ball and then without doing anything else differently… everything else fell into place. Life was good again!
Why do I reference this?
Well, recently I’ve been stressing about all the changes in our country and in the world in general. The rate of change is sometimes more than I can keep up with and I can tell it is having a negative effect on my psyche. Then one evening, my wife and I were talking about humility, and that word stuck with me for a couple of days. I just kept thinking about being humble and what that really means. What I learned was this…
Humility is actually an attitude of spiritual modesty that comes from understanding our place in the larger order of things. It entails us not taking our desires, successes, or failings too seriously. Being humble is really the act of placing ourselves in the correct relationship under another authority. Back to my golf story, it’s the act of placing myself where I need to be relative to the ball in order to hit it properly.
When I get all stressed out and worried about our country and our world in general, I am placing myself in a position I don’t belong and shouldn’t be because I am not the one that can control it. What I need to do is get back to the place where I need to be and trust in the authority I have placed myself under to handle those issues. Once I do that, everything works.
So where is that proper place and who is that authority?
For me, the right place for me is to place myself under God. He is the only one that can make the changes that need to be made for our country and our world. Our leaders can’t and our culture won’t.
Practicing humility is tough…but it’s critical to our success and our overall happiness. Our culture views being humble as a bad thing. They try to tell us that it is disempowering and it promotes thinking less of ourselves. But in actuality, it is empowering because we are thinking of ourselves… less and that’s our perfect place. It’s the way we were designed and created to be.
So the next time you feel “out of sorts and stressed out”…make sure to check your setup.