We human beings are constantly searching for something more. My wife calls this “greener grass syndrome.” However, we are not sure what it is we are looking for and consequently this is how we waste most of our time. Unfortunately for us, time equals life. George MacDonald, a man who greatly influenced C. S. Lewis, wrote, “It is this formless idea of something at hand that keeps men and women striving to tear from the bosom of the world the secret of their own hopes. How little they know that what they look for in reality is their God!”
I know that in my own human nature I am always looking for the next-thing, or as George MacDonald put it: the “something at hand.” We are never satisfied with where we are. This can be good and bad all at the same time, depending on how we use it.

When I was in high school my hand eye coordination was so bad that I couldn’t play any sport which involved a ball. So I did my school a favor and ran Cross-Country and Track instead. Amazingly, our team won the state championship my freshman year. Just as amazingly, that didn’t seem to matter at all to our coach when we came out for practice the following year. We had to train just as hard the next season. Why? We had to accomplish the next-thing: winning another championship, which we did, again and again and again.

Pursuit of the next-thing can keep you pretty busy. It did with me. I remember winning the state championship my senior year. It was an amazing feeling to have gone undefeated all four years. But nothing prepared me for what I felt the day after my last championship race. Since I wasn’t good enough to run at any major college, there were no more races to be won. For the first time in my running career there was no next-thing. There was pit in my stomach and a realization that the last four years probably hadn’t mattered much in the grand scheme of things. Think about it, who really cares about a state-championship running team from a middle sized school somewhere in the Mid-West in the 1990’s?

Is the “next thing” really the thing we should be chasing after?