Sow your seed in the morning, and in the evening let not your hands be idle, for you do not know which will succeed, whether this or that, or whether both will do equally well.

Ecclesiastes 11:6, NIV (1978)

Stay in your lane! This is a phrase we here more often each day. It's perhaps a bit more polite than telling people to mind their own business, but just a little. The fact is that most people have you pegged and want to make sure that you stay in the hole that they believe your shape of peg fits. Maybe that's why our college entrance scores have continually gone down over the past 50 years or so. "Kids can only learn so much" and "No child left behind" have resulted in all of our kids achieving less than they should. Some will argue that this is not so, that grade point averages are up over the years. The sad truth is that the cause of these higher G.P.A. scores has largely been a result of lower standards rather than higher learning.

Stay in your lane is almost a religious-level belief in much of our business world. Men and women who in the past were encouraged to shown curiosity beyond their own departments in order that they might advance and be of more use to the company are now often encouraged to not worry about what is going on outside of their immediate area of responsibility. However, instead of achieving the goal of an "assembly line" level of productivity by having people focus only on the task at hand, it has typically resulted in lower quality and a dumbed down workforce.

We have seen the same thing in the church for far too many years. Empty philosophies such as "Don't study for yourself, leave it to the experts" or "No one but the highly trained and church ordained personnel can really understand the Bible" have retarded genuine spiritual knowledge and growth for centuries. Such an encouragement towards ignorance should shock us, but most people are a little lazy at heart, so the encouragement to not become too inquisitive about "God's mysterious ways" is well received by most.

So, whether we are looking at things like education, work, or our eternal souls, most people are more than content to "stay in their lane" and let someone else do the heavy lifting. If our hollowed out lives result in lower standards and inferior levels of achievement, then that is all right because it fits into the new world order of bare minimum effort that seems to appeal to the masses. 

My encouragement to you is to get out of your lane!

By that, I don't mean meddling in areas that you don't have any business in in the first place; rather, I mean that we need to get away from our welfare mentality of doing as little as possible and letting someone else take care of everything else. This has resulted in lower I.Q.s, inferior products, a watered-down church, and a government that is primarily populated by parasitic individuals who do not have our best interests at heart.

I believe that it is more than time to get out of our lanes and start noticing what is going on around us. For Christians, it will begin with reading our Bibles so that we do not have to have our eternities staked on the good intentions of our religious leaders who are often more interested in maintaining the party line of denominationalism than they are in preaching the truth in love. For parents, it will mean carefully selecting which school your child will attend, and if a suitable one cannot be found then taking the difficult path of home-schooling which will take an absolute commitment to for it to be effective. For employers, it will mean hiring people who have a keen sense of curiosity that is combined with a loyalty to the company brand. For citizens, it will mean becoming familiar with the founding documents and laws and holding your elected leaders to them.

Our world has devolved into a place where standards and expectations are continually lowered to the point where it is quite literally killing us. Wise men and women will ask why this is happening and will then set out to do something about finding solutions once they have discovered the source of the problem. This will indeed require us to be sowing our seed in the morning and not letting our hands be idle in the evening, and most people frankly do not have that kind of drive.

However, for those who do, wonderful things await - things that most people have sadly forgotten all about. Things such as excellence and quality and virtue. Things such as high achievement and pride of workmanship. And, ultimately, things such as salvation and eternal life! I don't know about you, but I have about had it up to here with the mediocrity and complacency that have become the hallmark of modern-day society. I know that it will take "getting out of my lane" to do something constructive about it. I also know that most will not appreciate that and fewer still will understand it, but that's all right. The path to success has always been a less-traveled road, so getting out of our lane really won't cause as much disruption and inconvenience to others as we might suspect. 

How about you - are you ready to "get out of your lane"? It will take a lot of hard work, but that's alright. Quality results have always demanded quality effort!