The Main Thing

Being a male and being one who has enjoyed sports, I do think there are lessons that are available and valuable for those who play them. I have often heard it said that one learns about team work, one learns about hard work, and one learns how to handle losses. Those are good lessons to learn, but the lesson I have been thinking about because of two parables in the New Testament is the lesson about the main thing. There is a story about the man who finds a treasurer in a field and goes, sells all he has and buys the field. There is another story about a man who collects pearls but when he finds this one amazing pearl, he sells all his other pearls and buys this one great pearl.

The lesson of the main things is that so many little things have to be sacrificed for the main thing. It is a lesson that applies to all great arts and endeavours but perhaps it is seen by more in the pursuit of Championships. To achieve the great goal means that lots of little pleasures, activities, entertainments, and hobbies have to be forsaken. The main thing demands our full attention. The main thing also directs us to lots of other activities.

Certainly one of the moral evils in our society today is that we are encouraged to try to have it all, to sacrifice the main thing for lots of little things. Our advertisements keep promoting thousands of little things: hair removal devices, nose hair cutters, thousands of different ways to cook a sandwich, little bungee chords to hold paint cans to ladders, and on and on. So much stuff, so many things that we lose sight of the main thing.

Perhaps that is why so often you hear about people needing to find themselves or to get their acts together. They suddenly realize that they have become so fragmented that they have no main thing and no center. Could it be that that is why the Westminster Confess begins with exactly that question, "What is the chief end of Man?" None of the little things are necessarily evil in and of themselves. But when they keep us from ever finding our main thing they loose "anarchy upon the land"(Yeats) and cause waste in our own lives.