The Problem with Delayed Gratification

I spent seven years  in my medical training and residency before I was qualified to practice as a pediatrician. I initially hadn’t thought much about delayed gratification, but the people around me seemed to mention it constantly, and so it eventually became much more ingrained in me. I started pushing everything in my mind off to the future so that I could concentrate on what was required right now. I would tell myself- one day I am going to have time to hang out with friends, one day I will have more time to read my Bible, one day I will pay a tithe, one day I will be able to make my own decisions about the cases I see, one day… And those older than me would constantly encourage me to just sacrifice my time, my relationships, my faith now, because they said that once I got to their position everything would change.

But I sat, nearly in tears one day in residency, trying to watch a presentation about “time management in medicine,” and what possibilities were coming when you finished your training for finally getting to enjoy what you’d sacrificed for so long. I cried afterwards because I realized that they didn’t mean “time management,” they meant the only way to make it happen was to sacrifice your health to make a few things work out decently on a very few select days.

It took me a long time to realize that “one day” was just a theory. Really, every year that passed there were more work requirements, more sacrifices to make for your family and friends, and more loves, hobbies, and goals that I continued to sacrifice again and again. We spend our whole lives trying our hardest not to fail at anything in our career, but never seem to put God on that same level of things that cannot be sacrificed. If we put off everything about our relationship with God until “one day”, we put off the very thing that gives us the ability to finish the rest of life.

If you never got any of those payoffs you are waiting for, would your life still be worth it?

The world has very specific ways that it defines success and thus a specific way of defining things worth sacrificing for. But the real question for a Christian is- was that the success God wanted you to have? It wasn’t until I finished my training that I realized that God never called us to live in a place of misery now, and just sit around waiting for “one day” to come. I hope you will learn that God gives the grace, strength, and supernatural ability to live our lives “exceedingly abundantly above all that we could ask or think,” not just “one day in the future,” but starting today if we put Him first instead of our careers and let Him mold the decisions and the sacrifices that we make, and letting Him take care of the rest.

 Ephesians 3:20- “Now to Him who is able to do exceedingly abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that works in us…”