The Dog Who Caught the Car

"You can catch every one of them and still lie awake at night, already scanning for the next."

A few years ago I looked around and realized I had caught most of what I had been chasing.

I had set goals that felt ambitious when I set them. I wanted to build the church and rise at work and write a meaninful book. One by one those things came. Opportunities opened up that a nobody from Lawrenceburg, Indiana had no business expecting. Larger platforms were circling, and people who could make things happen were asking for meetings.

You probably follow men like me because of things like that. You see the results and you want them, and I understand that because I wanted them too. But what I need you to understand is what happened after I got them.

I caught the cars, and I was not satisfied. My first instinct was to go looking for another one.

There is an old image of a dog chasing a car. He runs after it day after day and never really believes he will catch it. But suppose one day he does. He would not know what to do with it, so he would lose interest and start chasing the next one. That dog is the thing I want to warn you about, because that dog was me.

Like many men, I loved the chase more than the prize. And here is what no one tells you while you are still running. The prize does not do what you think it will do. You tell yourself a story about it. You say you will be satisfied when you make VP. You will be satisfied when the church reaches a certain size. You will be satisfied when you finish the degree or publish the book. Then you get there, and life keeps going.

Movies end at the climax, but real life does not, except for death itself. You reach the summit and take a breath, and then you discover that tomorrow is Tuesday and the alarm still goes off at the same time. The accomplishment becomes ordinary much faster than you expected. The possession loses its shine and the promotion becomes yesterday's news.

Augustine had the diagnosis right when he said our heart is restless until it rests in God. No car on the road will quiet it. You can catch every one of them and still lie awake at night, already scanning for the next.

This is the part that younger men do not believe until it is too late. You think the problem is that you have not caught enough yet, and that one more will finally do it. It will not. The chase is not broken because you are after the wrong things. The chase is broken because you have asked it to do something it was never able to do.

What saved me was not catching more. It was learning where my wings actually work.

I keep returning to the story of Icarus and his father Daedalus. I have heard it preached as a warning against ambition, but I do not think that is what it means. It is about flying at the proper height. Icarus did not die because he flew. He died because he flew too high and ignored the boundaries that were built into his own design. His father flew the middle course and reached Sicily alive. A wise man knows there are heights he can reach and heights he should not pursue.

For me those boundaries did not arrive as wisdom. They arrived as difficulty. I was a bivocational pastor with a large family, and I had to pass on much of what was opening up in front of me. Then our family entered a long season of death. Over several years we buried family members and close friends, and some of them died in tragic ways. Between the losses and the demands of ministry and the weight of work and family, I did not have the capacity to chase what was circling.

At the time it felt like loss. Looking back, I can see that it was instruction. God sent difficulty into my life to teach me something I would not have learned any other way. I have enough. To keep climbing past that point would cost me things worth far more than influence.

This is not a call to abandon ambition. God made men to build and to extend, and there is a real and honest satisfaction in doing hard things well. So keep building. But build at the altitude where your wings actually work. Learn that faithfulness matters more than endless expansion, and learn that some of God's best gifts are not new opportunities but boundaries.

At some point a man has to be able to look at his life and say that this will do.

I decided to stay at this altitude. If I climb much higher it may cost me my soul. Here, my wings will not melt.

Painting: Thomas Smythe