Chasing After The Worthless

Chasing After The Worthless | Joseph Lalonde

Have you ever thrown a boomerang? If you have, you probably know how difficult it can be to get it to return.

Most of the time it flies in the opposite direction you want it to. Never to return.

Sometimes you may be able to get it to hook and fly back to your hand. That’s probably very infrequent.

Your hope is that your throw will look something like this:

I recently purchased one of the Mantis boomerangs featured in the video above. My hopes were high that I would soon be throwing like these champs.

I was sadly mistaken.

On my first outing with the boomerang, I made a bad throw. The boomerang came out of my hand early. It flew fast and far. Then it started to rise higher and higher. Finally came the wicked hook into the 40 to 50 foot tall tree.

Knowing it was in the tree, I decided to make my attempt at retrieving the boomerang. I used what I had at hand, an old volleyball that our youth group used. I threw and threw that ball and couldn’t get the boomerang down.

Eventually our youth pastor came out and offered to help. He went and retrieved the ladder from the church. We propped it against the tree but that was of no use. It was too short.

With that failure, he attempted to throw the volleyball and knock down the boomerang. On one attempt the volleyball becomes lodged into the tree. Now we have two items stuck.

Next comes the rocks. We start chucking them into the tree trying to knock out the volleyball and the boomerang. No luck.

After an hour we had to admit defeat. We were not getting them down that night.

Think about our situation. We’re two grown men standing around a tree for over an hour. We’re putting ladders up, throwing volleyballs, and throwing rocks. All in an attempt to get down a $20 boomerang.

Can you imagine how ridiculous we looked? Pretty silly I bet!

But how often do we do this in our lives? We chase after the tasks that are not valuable.

It could be a business idea that’s going nowhere, a hobby that’s taking up too much time, or a friendship that has run it’s course.

Whatever it is, we’re putting too much effort into trying to keep it. The time and effort is more than the return we’ll ever see.

When it comes to these situations, we have to make a decision on whether or not it’s time to cut our losses. To walk away and leave it be.

The decision will be hard. You may not like what has to be done. But you have to make a decision.

Examine your life today. Look for any areas that you’re putting too much emphasis on and not getting a return. Make a decision on whether or not it’s something that you need to keep pursuing.

Maybe it’s not always trying to fix something broken. Maybe it’s about starting over and creating something better…

Question: Is it time you give up something so you can move onto better things? Please share your thoughts in the comment section below.