Five days a week I force myself out of bed before 5:15 AM to torure myself doing exercises and walking. It is torture and no one can make see it as anything else! I eat less than I used to eat. I eat less of the foods I really enjoy than I used to eat. I take fish oil pills everyday. Have you ever thought what led someone to discover that fish oil is supposed to be good for you?
Genetically I am destined to make it to 95 assuming that cancer or a Mack truck doesn't wipe out my genes first. If I am to live that long, I want to be healthy throughout most of the process. Besides I promised my wife that she would not have to bury me. That's my motivation.
My Kentucky Wildcat basketball team is playing in the NCAA tournament. That's motivation for me to look up game times, get into a bracket guessing competition, and hope certain other teams that wear dark blue get beat early. I get excited about college basketball, even more so with my alma mater playing. I get motivated to do something, even silly stuff.
Motivation is from the inside. It's kind of like anger. No one makes you angry. You allow yourself to become angry. No one motivates you. You allow yourself to become motivated. Your value system determines what is worth getting the blood pressure up, the heart rate up, the expenditure of energy up, maybe even the expenditure of material resources. If you are not motivated, you don't make the sacrifice, expend the energy or time. It's all about your value system.
Your value system determines if your material resources take you where you want to go or your time or general abilities or your relationships or perhaps life itself, your own life. What you value the most determines where you will find motivation and so be willing to make the sacrifice.
Sure, it's the same old life lesson. Based on my faith in Jesus Christ, how motivated am I to live out Luke 9:23? I take time to scream for those Wildcats. Am I as willing to act foolish for Christ, live daily for him, carry my cross for him, just follow him wherever he says to go?
Motivation. We want it. Sometimes we are just not as willing to go where it should take us.
