When you take the time it takes, it takes less time.

About a month ago, I was given the opportunity to go through some amazing self-development training.  Some training that forced me to dig deep.  To look at why I do things the way I do them.  To learn why I react to things the way I react.  We worked with horses as we went through this life-changing training against the backdrop of God’s artistry in Wyoming.  During our time there, this line was repeated- “When you take the time it takes, it takes less time.”

It’s a nice sentiment on it’s surface:  if you take the time it takes to read an entire recipe instead of getting halfway through prepping dinner to discover you don’t have all the ingredients, it takes less time to get dinner on the table because you don’t have to scrap that and figure something else out.  If you take the time it takes to properly potty train your new puppy through consistency, it takes less time because your puppy isn’t confused about what to do when it needs to go outside.   But this quote?  This idea is far too intense to let it just sit as a nice little saying.

We live in this age of instant gratification, instant information, instant food, instant anything really.  We live in an era of everyone wanting something done and wanting it done right now.  We live in this space where if something is taking too long or is getting too hard, we decide it’s not for us any more.  We want the biggest and best without having to put in the actual time and effort to get those things!  We want to lose weight in a week with a magic shake.  We want to make six figures as soon as we graduate from college without having to work as an intern and do the grunge work while working our way up the ranks.  We want to have that big house or that fancy car or the vacation home without putting in the years of saving and investing and time.

A child throws a fit because he doesn’t get his way, so you give them what they want because it’s easier and it’s hard to see them so upset.  Then down the road, you try and change that behavior after it’s been established (or worse, you continue to give them what they want leading to an entirely different battle of entitlement, but we’ll leave that for another time).  If you’d taken the time it takes to teach them right away “that’s not how you get what you want,” it would have taken less time (and your preschool years would have been a lot easier with established expectations for behavior!).

You start a business, and you’re excited and passionate and can’t get enough of it…but you aren’t successful overnight.  It’s hard!  It takes so much time and effort and blood and sweat and tears.  It takes trying new things and making sacrifices.  So rather than give all you have to your dream, you quit and move on to another business venture and start all over.  Or worse yet, you settle for something that doesn’t bring you any fulfillment at all.  Or you can take the time it takes so it takes less time to do something that feeds your soul.

You discover marriage is hard.  You discover living with another human being everyday means you committed to the good things and the bad things.  It means learning to share your entire self with that person- hopes, dreams, feelings and frustrations.  It means learning how to communicate and to not go to bed angry and not hold in feelings that build up.  But that’s scary and hard, to let someone see your entire self, so instead you choose the easy path and walk away because that’s less work for you.  But if you’d taken the time it takes, it takes less time.

You lose a baby at six weeks.  You’re devastated but you hear “you can always try again” and “there’s always a reason for everything” so you make yourself “get over it” and pretend like it wasn’t a big deal.  Until weeks later, all those feelings come flooding to the surface because you weren’t allowed to grieve that little life.  If you take the time it takes, it takes less time.

You have these dreams and these goals and a vision of what you want your life to look like…but it’s taking too long.  Instead of letting it take the time it takes, you try and make things happen faster or skip the important parts.  The necessary parts.  The growth.  The learning.  The valleys and the mountaintops.  The recognizing it’s not always all about you.  We don’t like that.  We don’t like it when it’s not all about us.  So we walk away from those things too and decide those dreams just “aren’t meant to be.”

But when we take the time it takes- If we continuously point our babies in the way they should go, they learn from early on that it’s not always all about them.  We learn that the little things that seem so tedious and monotonous, done day after day, build upon each other to create an amazing business or career that ignites our passion.  We learn that relationships get so much better over time if we take the time it takes to tend to them faithfully and learn how to do life with another person.  We learn that if we take the time it takes to grieve losses, it takes less time to bring beauty from ashes.  We learn that our greatest purpose in life lies not in living a mediocre life spent focused on ourselves but in an amazing life filled with purpose and happiness and joy that’s chosen and overflows to serve those around us.

We learn that when we take the time it takes to grow, to learn, to listen, to reflect, to take the hard roads, it takes less time.  While the easier roads may seem faster, you have to travel and backtrack and turn around on far too many of them to reach the same destination.  In fact, you may never make it there at all, and then you get to look back on a life of regret.  On a life of giving up when you should have given it your all.  On a life of quitting when you were on the brink of a breakthrough.  On a life of just getting by instead of a life of thriving and passion.  On a life wrapped up in your own wants instead of a life marked by making a difference.

When you take the time it takes, it takes less time.