progress

Progress: n. 1. Movement, as toward a goal; advance.

My boss called me into his office one time to ask me what my problem was. “You do good work,” he said, “but you’re always trying to figure out some other way to do it rather than our normal procedures.” One time a youth pastor came to me and said that I had a “spirit of conflict”. He said that I “was never satisfied with the way things are.” I gave them both the same answer: that I believe that the way we’re doing it right now is the best way to do it, but we should always be looking for a better way.

Progress for the sake of change is pointless, because much of the time you regress just to be different. Progress for the sake of progress, however, means constantly trying new things to find the next step, the next move, the path towards the goal. I’m not satisfied with normal. I’m not going to accept doing things the way I’ve always done them, just because that’s comfortable.

The Latin word that progress comes from means to walk forward, and anytime you walk forward where no one has been it means that you’re the most likely person to trip on a root or fall in a hole or take a confident step off the edge of the cliff. It’s nice to know that I have someone ahead of me to pick me up and set me back upright when I fall.

I love progress. I love to expand the barriers of what we see as the “correct” way of doing things, the tried-and-true methodology of how we live, how we interact, how we worship, how we connect to our Heavenly Father. C. S. Lewis wrote, "If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world." I choose to be unsatisfied until the pilgrim’s progress reaches its destination.