Not every slightly difficult task is a “Challenge”.
“We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed”.
2 Corinthians 4:8
We hear about “challenge” far too much in the church. Some round faced, Low-Testosterone loser gets up before the assembly and gives a “devotional” talk or sermon with precisely zero challenging ideas in it. Then some other eunuch will get up after him and say “Thank you, brother, for that challenging lesson”.
Really? This is what has become of challenges? Challenges are supposed to be something that is actually difficult to think about or accomplish; hearing yet another effeminate, emotional sermon about the infinite grace of God is not exactly a War Cry.
The word “Challenge” implies obstacles, difficulty or even the desire not to embark on the challenge because of how difficult it is. Not every lesson given by a college kid with less Bible knowledge than a single-celled organism is a “Challenge”. We have grown up in the 20th-21st century without any violent religious persecution. This prolonged peace and ease has resulted in an epidemic of weak men who think everything is a challenge.
“Let me just leave you with this challenge tonight”.
“Let me challenge you to be a good Christian”. What a profound, groundbreaking statement.
These phrases and any others like them should be trampled under the foot of Man, for they are not challenges, they are the manifestation of pseudo-spiritual emotionalism. If we are constantly being challenged, then why is no one in the Church improving? They remain spiritually, emotionally and physically stagnant. They do not improve their minds or their finances. They do not improve their bodies or their souls. The only thing most young men improve at is the ability to sneak girls into their dorms at the so-called “Christian Universities”. Yet we are still being “challenged” all the time. In order for a person to improve, they have to be stressed outside their current abilities or they will never have anything to adapt to – This is called the Overload Principle.
We must challenge the modern definition of “challenge”.
In the old days when you challenged someone, it was a duel, a fight, a legal argument, something men participated in. A Challenge is a dare, a call-to-arms, a difficult to achieve goal, which implies that there is possibility for pain or for loss. That is something boys in the church know nothing about anymore. So stop using the word “challenge”, because the probability that anything you are dealing with is challenging is low.
At one point in history, men your age stormed Normandy’s beaches, charging into a storm of lead with the near certainty of death in the back of their minds. Many of those men were very young, sometimes 16 years old, and they lied about their age and said they were older so they could join the military because they felt a sense of duty. They had unparalleled courage and strength of will to charge into the face of death. They had unimaginable selflessness to give up another 80 years of living for the sake of the ideals of freedom.
And now you sit here complaining about how hard it is to finish that English degree.
Because the presence of true challenges is low, you must seek out challenges, for it is within the challenge and the pain that we grow as individuals. Seek and destroy real challenges and improve yourself. And until you are willing to truly push yourself to be better through discomfort and the application of work ethic, discard the word “challenge”, it’s a cliche` Christian Buzzword. Be a man.
Mantra
This is not even difficult.
Application
You are going to have to actively seek out difficulty if you want to grow. All the comforts of the modern age have softened males. Seek out the most difficult task at your work and do it. Crush the most difficult task at the beginning of the day, do not leave it till the end of the day.
Get yourself in the gymnasium. We can simulate difficulty and adversity on our terms when we go to the gym, which makes it an incredible tool for the mind. Before you even start your training you must decide that you are going to push past the discomfort in your body and drive yourself to be more. Tell yourself that once you feel pain, you will push yourself for two more repetitions. Then the next training session with the same exercise, push yourself to three repetitions past when you feel discomfort. In this way you build your work ethic.
Work ethic can be built, but it will not happen sooner than a month.
Most likely it will take even longer than six months of focused work to build any respectable level of work ethic. But if you put in the time and build the work ethic, your capacity to do work will grow. You now have the ability to do greater volumes of work for longer periods of time. Work ethic is one of the foundational principles of success. If you can develop the ability to push yourself physically, it will have a spillover effect on your mind. Over time you will be better able to push past mental barriers and mental discomfort in the same way that you pushed past mental and physical barriers in the gym. It is not a difficult thing to comprehend, you simply have to do the work.
Get up. Do the difficult things, and you will find that eventually what you once thought was difficult is now easy. And the tasks that betas in the Church call “Challenging”, you will be able to mock with your personal accomplishments.
Conduct yourselves like Men.
