The Principle of Maximization

I love it when you can see truth principles in multiple areas of your life. One of the ones standing out to me lately is this principle of maximization (yeah I made that up) It’s what I’m calling the whole idea of “the more _____, the more ______.”

The more I run, the more I want to run. Back in high school I ran about 50-60 miles a month and by the end of a season, I was burnt out and I would take a break from running. After high school I took a LONG break. I didn’t run most of college. I started back during my last semester running about 3 times a week. When I moved to Chattanooga, I ran sporadically but never stayed committed long. When I moved to Crockett, I started running with the CC team. That first season I ran about what I had done in high school: 50 miles a month. The next year I decided to train for my first marathon. I ran ~70 miles a month for 3 months and then took December off. But I wanted to get back to it and ran most of the spring. But then I took the summer off. The next fall I trained for my 2nd marathon. I ran more like 80 miles a month to train this time. Afterwards I only took off a few weeks. I ran way more that next spring and even ran some through the miserably hot summer. This past fall I ran ~100 miles a month. I had planned on taking some time off this winter(surely I’d be burned out after all that extra milage), but I barely made it a week. I’m already back to it and looking for races to train for. My running history has taught me: the more you run, the more you run. I always wondered how people like my running partner, Judi never took time off or got burned out. Now I know how it can happen. The more I do it, the more enjoyable it is, the more benefits I get from it, and the harder it is to stop.

Mr. Newman, my math teacher in high school always used to say “the more you know, the more you know.” He was famous for these incredibly hard tests where the problems were unlike any you had done in class or practiced in homework. They would require you to take the theories and principals you had learned and apply them to a new type of problem. And in so doing we figured out what he meant by that statement. You may have learned A, B, and C but since you knew all 3 you actually knew how to do D. I find this in my teaching all the time. A kid will ask a question about how something in a cell or in the body works. It will be a question I’ve never thought about and the answer will not be something I actually ever read or was taught, but because I know about other principles of how life processes work, I will be able to figure it out very quickly in my head and then answer their question.

The more faith you have, the more faith you have. Acts of faith always lead to more faith, which allows for bigger acts of faith. How do I have faith to follow God into owning a business, something that looks stupid in a down economy? Because 20 years ago He answered a simple prayer, and that led to bigger prayers and cooler answers. Each act of faith begot a bigger act of faith until the most recent: (our move to Crockett, the miracles of: finding jobs, selling a house and finding another, and all the bonuses God blessed us with for stepping out) If this trend continues, I’ll be telling mountains to jump into the sea before long.

The more you experience God, the more you experience God. This one’s the hardest to explain. But something supernaturally is transmuted in us when we enter His presence. He can only reveal small increments of Himself because if we were to take in all that glory, it would kill us. But He eases us in and every time we are changed by His presence, it means we will have the capacity to experience a bigger part of Him the next time.

The opposite of this principle is also true. The less___, the less ____. You don’t use it, you lose it. The longer I went without running, the harder it was to start back. The more years I go without using calculus, the less likely it would be to ever pass a Newman test. (I doubt I could pass any of his calculus tests today) If I go a week without acknowledging God and seeking out his presence and involvement in my life, I miss so much of what He’s doing and even get to a point where I think He’s not doing anything (even though He is)

The principle of maximization is exponential. If I graphed it, it would look like Y = X^3 (thanks Mr. Newman) Jesus was such a genius(of course He was) in summing up these kind of principles: He said it this way: “whoever has will be given more, and he will have an abundance. But whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken from him.” (Mat 13:12)