As part of my annual review for 2012, I mentioned that I need to give some more thought to why my discipline felt so lame. I’d like to take some paragraphs here and think through some of this. Why did my disciple die in 2012?
Well, first off, maybe it didn’t. After all, I finished my Master’s in 2012. I recall more than a dozen nights when I stayed up past 5:00am wrapping up (read: starting, researching, writing, and submitting) projects for that degree. Some weeks, I had multiple nights like that thanks to how classes tend to pile up with work at the end of the semester. So maybe it wasn’t that my disciple died – maybe I just used it all up.
The second thing I can think of is that maybe I lost inspiration. I’ve written before about how inspiration is perishable, and as a result, I need to do things when I want to do them because it will be way harder when I don’t want to. The book and the videos, for instance, were totally sabotaged when my computer died. Even once I recovered the files and got a new computer, I felt like my drive to finish those projects had already seeped out of my system.
The third reason is that maybe I stopped exercising my discipline. Going from full throttle – teaching English, working with the church, finishing a degree, prepping to move away from Korea – down to returning from Kentucky and simply getting ready for Saudi Arabia… maybe that was too big a downshift for me.
Most likely, it was a combo of all three of these.
