Running the Right Race

The Art of Unlearning, Chapter 7, Part 2

Running the Right Race

One of the more lucrative summer jobs some of my friends got in college was harvesting fish in Alaska. The hours were long, the weather was cold, there was little sleep and much isolation, but ten or twelve weeks of hard work and the wages that followed could go a long way to bolster a college student’s budget.

Imagine if someone decided to put in that labor: they suffered through the smell, the cold, the tiredness, the isolation from friends and missing out on summer parties, endured the queasiness of living on a boat in the middle of the ocean, and at the end of the summer they were paid…nothing. Let’s say they harvested halibut, but the firm that hired them only wanted salmon. It takes the same amount of work, sweat and effort to get halibut as it does salmon, but if your parent company only sells one kind of fish, the halibut you harvested isn’t worth anything to them which makes your work and sacrifice worth…nothing.

Wouldn’t it be awful to work so hard all summer long and get zero profit from that labor?

King Solomon warns us that many, perhaps even most of the people living today, are harvesting the wrong fish. They’re not going to get what they want, even though they are tiring themselves out, perhaps even living very disciplined lives, but because they are chasing the wrong thing, or a lesser thing, none of that work will “count.”

Life in Christ entails a focused pursuit of one particularly valuable trait, worth more than just about any other pursuit: wisdom. We must unlearn our complacency about our ignorance.