I don’t believe there has ever been a time in the entire history of the world that has held more distractions than the time we live in now. The internet, laptops, tablets, and cell phones are just the starting point of social media videos, comments, pictures, memes and images. Perhaps you are one of the rare breed that isn’t on social media or doing extensive web searches. But for you your distraction can be the television, movie theaters, or Red Box. Those are common distractions that hinder most of us day to day but it doesn’t stop there, it continues with malls, gyms, shopping centers, coffee shops, restaurants, cafes, entertainment complexes, and so on and so forth. Not that distractions haven’t always played a role in human existence. I mean just look at the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve fell because of broken focus, but I digress. With so many “options” the door to excuses and reasons is wide open.
If someone asks why an appointment or meeting was missed, nine times out of ten we rattle off an excuse that involves something else we were doing at the time. There are so many choices of other things we can be doing or other places we can be spending our time. I was born up north and moved to the south, Florida to be exact, as an adult and I’ve lived here for 14 years. The transition from northern living to a southern mentality was quite difficult at first. Up north if you have a meeting, date, or appointment people not only keep those commitments, they show up on time, if not early. That couldn’t be further from the truth of what I experienced here in the southern part of the country. So since people R.S.V.P. and don’t show up, or make and break appointments frequently, it causes them to have to make up or come up with excuses. The problem with excuses is that they leave room for the other party to analyze them and decide if they are sufficient enough. For example, if someone asks you to go to the movies and you say, “I really need to clean my house” (excuse), they could (not realistically but potentially) say, “No problem! I’ll come over and help you and we can go after.” Now you’re trapped. You gave an excuse, and they gave a solution to your excuse. The reality is you didn’t really want to go and you should have just said that.
This excuse-driven mindset got me thinking about life as a whole. If we all have excuses for why we do what we do, those excuses can be dismantled by others. But if we walk in the truth, at all times, then we don’t have to explain ourselves constantly. If we have true convictions about who we are and what we do I’m not saying that we won’t ever have to explain, but we certainly won’t ever have to back pedal. Don’t make excuses for what you do, make a decision about who you are. Once you decide who you are, it will fuel how you think, and it will give you a reason for what you do. We are entering the fourth quarter of the year, which to me still represents a new start. We’re in the home stretch, and now is the time to put down all the excuses and determine to live and function for all of the right reasons.
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