Where’s my ticket, Lord, and whose luggage is this?

Your sweet spot. That place of perfect pitch, where there is a harmonious balance of minimum energy and maximum impact. If you have ever experienced “being in the zone”, where time flies as you effortlessly accomplish a particular task, you have been in your sweet spot. (No, it is not that place in your desk drawer where you keep the candy…)

Max Lucado authored an incredible book titled Cure for the Common Life. In it, he writes about how he believes that God has prepared each of us for a particular journey, and that He has packed for us accordingly. He also makes the case that many of us are living out of someone else’s luggage, thereby causing us to be very uncomfortable with the fit of our lives. Think about it. If you picked up Mrs. Plump and Kindly Grandmother’s suitcase on the airport carousel, would you just say, “Oh, well. I am sure these stockings and dresses will do. They certainly are roomier and brighter than my business suits. Perhaps the CEO will notice me now.” No. You would move heaven and earth to find your own luggage. Why, then, do we allow ourselves to be content living our lives as Henry David Thoreau described when he said, “Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.”?

The author backs up his premise with some sobering statistics about how much stress and unhappiness exist in the workplace today:

• Unhappiness on the job affects one-fourth of the American workforce
• One-fourth of employees view their jobs as the number one stressor in their lives
• Seven out of ten people are neither motivated nor competent to perform the basics of their job
• Forty-three percent of employees feel anger toward their employers often or very often as a result of feeling overworked

Right, then. No wonder customer service is an endangered species. Let me just go chow down on some M&M’s—my occasional remedy for stress and depression—before we get to what is good about this.

You know that when you are sick, real sick, go-to-the-doctor-sick, because your family and coworkers, and maybe you, have had it with your hacking/stuffiness and other assorted icky symptoms? You go because you haven’t been able to get better on your own. You need someone with more knowledge than you to help lead you to wellness, either with information about behavior changes (“no more M&M’s!”) and/or medicine. We have to recognize we have a problem in order to solve it, and that maybe we need to stop relying on just ourselves for everything. We have to reject the foregone conclusion that this illness—whether in the workplace or in our own bodies—is the norm, and that there really isn’t anything better.

There is much, much more, if we only gather up our courage to see what might be possible. As Lucado writes, “God did not drop you into the world utterly defenseless and empty-handed. You arrived fully equipped.” Rather than railing every day about how miserable and lost you are, open up your suitcase, and check out what amazing tools have been packed so that you, too, can live and work in your sweet spot . Not only will you find the fit for which you long, but your ticket is already included as well. All aboard!