day no. 17,261: mission creeps

“You don’t want to be the gardener who gets so focused on pulling weeds that he forgets he is doing so in order to grow something else. It is supposed to be a flower garden, not a no-weeds dirt patch.” — Douglas Wilson, Mines of Difficulty

Mission creep can happen to anyone. You need to bail water in order to keep the boat afloat and so the bureau for bailing water is created. They are essential, don't you know, to the preservation of the ship. But the reason the ship left port in the first place was not merely stay afloat. If that was the goal, staying in the harbor would have better served that end. No, the ship left the safety of the harbor for a reason. There was a destination in mind or some fish to catch or an enemy to engage. Staying afloat is, of course, crucial to completing the mission, whatever it was, but it is not the mission itself. The mission is landing at that place, returning with those fish, or sinking that enemy. When we make side quests the top priority, we are off mission. 

The point of a garden is to grow things. Weeds interfere with that goal. So, weeds must be pulled, but not because pulling weeds is important, but because growing things is. So, sins must be dealt with, but not because dealing with sin is the chief end of man, but because glorying God and enjoying Him forever is, and sins get in the way of that.

"We may have a duty to rescue a drowning man and, perhaps, if we live on a dangerous coast, to learn lifesaving so as to be ready for any drowning man when he turns up. It may be our duty to lose our own lives in saving him. But if anyone devoted himself to lifesaving in the sense of giving it his total attention—so that he thought and spoke of nothing else and demanded the cessation of all other human activities until everyone had learned to swim—he would be a monomaniac. The rescue of drowning men is, then, a duty worth dying for, but not worth living for. It seems to me that all political duties (among which I include military duties) are of this kind. A man may have to die for our country, but no man must, in any exclusive sense, live for his country. He who surrenders himself without reservation to the temporal claims of a nation, or a party, or a class is rendering to Caesar that which, of all things, most emphatically belongs to God: himself.”

― C.S. Lewis, Learning in Wartime (The Weight of Glory)

Keeping your house from burning down is a noble goal, but living to keep your house fireproof is a lame way to spend your life. Saving a drowning victim is a noble venture and worth losing your life over if you should fail, but living your life looking for drowning victims is a waste of a life and not worth the cost of burying your talents in the sand as you watch and wait. Do not allow yourself to become a lopsided monster. Do not be a mission creep.