Drive

I have met many driven people in my life. I have often met one when I look in the mirror. A driven person is someone who feels motivated by something, a negative thing, that pushes him or her to do whatever it takes to achieve a certain goal.

One might be driven by ambition, greed, the need to please others, fear of failure or jealousy. These things are like a car that drives too close to your rear. They lurk frustratedly in one’s rear-view mirror, always commenting, urging, pushing, driving.

One of the problems with being driven is being prone to burnout  Burnout is not just feeling tired, but a complete collapse; it is engine failure. But the main problem is that being driven is not how God designed human beings to be. Rather, human beings were designed to be called people. We were supposed to follow a call from outside ourselves not react to some force within us. And being called implies a caller, one who knows us, speaks our name and is with us in our toil.

At root, being driven is a tribute to our sense of autonomy, to think we are our own lord. To be driven fails to recognize our dependency, our createdness and our need.