At Another Person's Pace…

Perhaps most of us have had the experience of trying too closely to follow another car; and soon we learn how hazardous and difficult it is, how tense and trying to drive at another person’s pace. To be safe and effective, and to enjoy the driving, we have to feel the road for ourselves.

In other things also, people are often made unhappy and uncomfortable by trying too hard to proceed at another person’s pace. Critical comparisons can make men most unhappy—and the whole course of life could become frustrating and ineffective by assuming that one person should precisely duplicate the performance of another person.

Sometimes parents make insistent comparisons between their children, and assume that one should closely follow the pattern and personality of another. But despite strong family resemblances, children are usually more different than identical. We all came here different. Ever man is an individual—eternally so. Without laboring the fact, let it simply be said that we are in part the product of our pre-existent past—and our talents and intelligence didn’t begin within the limits of this life. Furthermore, with our God-given freedom, one person may not choose to move in another person’s pattern.

Sometimes trying too closely to follow our neighbors’ pattern causes unhappiness and hazard—especially financial hazard. This counsel came to one young man: “Do not run faster or labor more than you have strength and means: . . .”¹⁰ Competition and energetic effort are very much worth while. They improve people, and they improve standards of performance. But trying to live our lives in the precise pattern of other people can be wasteful and unwise.

In the Saviour’s parable of the talents, the penalty imposed on the man who had one talent was not for his failure to have five but for his failure to use what he had. The Lord God does not expect us to be identical with anyone else. He knows us and expects us to be ourselves. (If we aren’t ourselves, we aren’t much of anything at all.) Nor does He expect of us perfection. But having given us freedom to feel the road for ourselves, He does expect us to be our better selves. He expects of us an honest, intelligent performance, with repentance and improvement—and not too much repeating of our own past errors.