Rebuking my lazybones once and for all

God is telling me to work.

Somewhere along the way, I lost sight of something that I used to take pride in: work. Not work in the traditional career sense, but in doing things that I feel I have been called to do. Growing up and throughout high school, no one could rightly call me lazy. I volunteered hundreds of hours, I worked several jobs, I nearly got straight A’s, and I started and maintained a YouTube channel since 2012. I got into the colleges I wanted to, even with some scholarships. In college, I got decent grades, posted consistently on YouTube, and worked. I even took a leave of absence to work full-time and graduated a semester early.

Since then I’ve had periods of time where I’ve worked really hard. But they’ve been limited. My identity used to be in how hard I worked, and then I think I swung the opposite direction. Maybe my problem was comfort. Maybe I have the generic gifted kid to burnt out adult trope. I hesitate to post something like this for fear of judgement of being seen as lazy. But I have been lazy and unmotivated in the last years. But I have found a renewed sense of purpose for work. I believe God has been giving me guidance with this.

Act I: Monday (5/5/25)

Hitting an Invisible Wall

I was on Twitter (yeah I know it’s called X now), and I came across this graph¹ on Monday, and I screenshotted it to send off to my husband and sister:

I was intrigued. The topic of agency was populating my feeds. This graph is referred to as a 2x2. It has 2 rows and 2 columns. I was able to identify myself in the graph. And then, I was able to see the next path forward. I texted my sister about it. I said I thought I was in the Spiritual Bypasser quadrant. She said she was too.

I can recognize myself in each of the phases at different points in my life. There have been few times where I feel like I’ve been operated in the Agentic Sage phase – where my ideas came to life and I was creating often. At this point, you have wisdom and you take action on that wisdom. If you work with others, it benefits everyone involved.

Unfortunately, I have been in the Spiritual Bypasser role. I have endless ideas, but they stay in the idea form, never really coming to fruition. The Spiritual Bypasser role is a very frustrating one to be in. You have the wisdom to know what you should be doing, but you don’t act on it. For whatever reason, you can’t. I have described it as hitting an invisible wall. And since I have had times where I’ve experienced high agency, it can be especially frustrating. Eventually, I lost trust in myself to accomplish anything because I couldn’t finish anything I started.

I have the image of being in bed in 2020 right before the pandemic hit. I had moved back home to Anchorage, Alaska with my parents. I enrolled in a coding bootcamp and was making YouTube videos. I was a bit depressed at this time. I would stay in bed in between my classes and long hours on the computer, and I thought about how much I loved being in bed. I loved sleeping. I loved the comfort it brought me. I did no harm in bed, and no harm was done to me. But… that’s no way to live. You may live a comfortable, restful and pampered life, but you’ll never live an accomplished, fulfilling life if you never leave your bed. Even more, for most, you’ll never be able to use your God-given talents if you never leave the comfort of your bed. This may seem obvious to some, but perhaps I inherited a distorted view of work.

Act II: Tuesday (5/6/25)

Acting on Imperfect Information.

On Tuesday, I set out to walk to a new coffee shop. Historically, coffeeshops have been a place where I move the agency needle. Each time, I’d go with so much hope. Maybe this time, I’ll find the thing to commit to working on. Maybe I’d edit or write something that I’d actually post. So much of this over and over again, and I lost hope. This trip was no different. Except, the journey there was.

As I walked to a new coffeeshop I listened to a Tim Ferriss podcast² with a guest I was unfamiliar with. In this episode, he was interviewing Stephen West, who is also a podcaster of a podcast called Philosophize This!

In every Tim Ferriss episode, his signature concluding question is the billboard question: If there was a metaphorical billboard that you could portray one message to a mass number of people, what would that message be?

Stephen replied with, “How about be the one that takes advice?… to really pay attention to the advice that’s being given to them…”

I was interested in the story of Stephen West as a person, so I decided to check out his podcast. Stephen recommends his series on Dostoevsky, the Russian novelist. I searched and clicked on the first episode that popped up.

In ep #222³, I heard a piece of clear advice for me, being delivered at the end of the episode. Stephen West compares Dostoevsky with Kierkegaard:

“Faith is more of a VERB than it is a NOUN to Dostoevsky. Faith in other words, for him, was MORE along the lines of how Kierkegaard viewed faith around this same time…

“… You can argue with yourself INFINITELY about what the perfectly correct thing to do is… but you can also just spend your entire life arguing with yourself up in your head but never taking action on anything. This is what Kierkegaard called being lost in the infinite…”

This related directly the tweet (the 2x2 graph) that I had seen the night prior. This time, I saw the graph, with a red line added to it by another poster:

Here, being “lost in the infinite”, as Kierkegaard describes, is in line with the Spiritual Bypasser. And this is the space that I’ve been finding myself in, specifically with my work. This is the same as the comfort of staying in bed. You do no harm, but you do no good. You believe and maybe even know that you could do a lot of good, yet you stay in bed. Your potential and impact remain in your head. Sure you can have great ideas that you know are great. You could give advice and wisdom. But the reality is, you need to do things in order for that advice to be considered. You need to take action.

Stephen West offers a solution to this recurring problem, that I have found myself in:

“But to Dostoevsky: doing ANYTHING meaningful in the world… REQUIRES an act of faith. It requires us recognizing… that we DON’T KNOW everything all the time. And more than that that it’s okay: we SHOULDN’T know everything all the time to be able to make a decision. The REAL challenge lies in STICKING to the path you’ve chosen… when you’re INEVITABLY going to run into things that are frustrating, difficult, horrifying,… all the things that are always going to be a part of this world we’re living in. Faith is the COMMITMENT REQUIRED to LIVE in a framing like this long enough to uncover what is has to show us.”

Act III: Monday (5/19/25)

Faith requires work

After a week of mulling over the Stephen West solution, I kept encountering recurring ideas that I needed to adjust my perspective on working. Almost a week later, I flipped my Bible open. I read the page, which showed James 2:14-26, with the subheading: “Faith without Good Deeds Is Dead.” My mom gifted me the NLT version of the Bible, which she read while I was growing up. In my journal from May 15th, I wrote down my dream, where it was me and my mom. In the dream, she pointed to the Bible verse that I flipped open to in reality. She encouraged me to follow the scripture, to live out the words on the page, and to act in faith. Here’s what that verse says:

James 2:14-26: Faith without Good Deeds Is Dead

¹⁴ What good is it, dear brothers and sisters, if you say you have faith but don’t show it by your actions? Can that kind of faith save anyone? ¹⁵ Suppose you see a brother or sister who has no food or clothing, ¹⁶ and you say, “Good-bye and have a good day; stay warm and eat well”—but then you don’t give that person any food or clothing. What good does that do?

¹⁷ So you see, faith by itself isn’t enough. Unless it produces good deeds, it is dead and useless.

¹⁸ Now someone may argue, “Some people have faith; others have good deeds.” But I say, “How can you show me your faith if you don’t have good deeds? I will show you my faith by my good deeds.”

¹⁹ You say you have faith, for you believe that there is one God. Good for you! Even the demons believe this, and they tremble in terror. ²⁰ How foolish! Can’t you see that faith without good deeds is useless?

²¹ Don’t you remember that our ancestor Abraham was shown to be right with God by his actions when he offered his son Isaac on the altar? ²² You see, his faith and his actions worked together. His actions made his faith complete. ²³ And so it happened just as the Scriptures say: “Abraham believed God, and God counted him as righteous because of his faith.” He was even called the friend of God. ²⁴ So you see, we are shown to be right with God by what we do, not by faith alone.

²⁵ Rahab the prostitute is another example. She was shown to be right with God by her actions when she hid those messengers and sent them safely away by a different road. ²⁶ Just as the body is dead without breath, so also faith is dead without good works.

According to this verse in James, it’s not enough to have faith in God. Just like it’s not enough to have great ideas that we never act on. We must follow through with action. Or else, it is as good as useless. In the passage, it’s like our ideas are our spirit and our action is our body. We need both in order to be functioning humans.

One of the things that I have always felt called to do in my work, is write. I write everyday in my journal… and those thoughts rarely leave the pages. I guess it’s similar to living an entire life in bed, for those words. I don’t think that everything that we do needs to be published or even publicized. But if you feel called to do something and you don’t do it, that bleeds into all aspects of life. Just like if you have faith, but no works to show it, how can you show or know that you really have faith? So, writing this is my attempt to that take action, to have works with my faith.

1. This graph is from a blog post called “High Agency to Wise Agency” by

Less Foolish

2. Luckily, both Tim Ferriss and Stephen West have transcriptions of their podcasts. This is the link to the transcription of the one I reference:

https://tim.blog/2025/04/26/stephen-west-philosophize-this-transcript/

3. Stephen West’s transcription of this episode:

https://www.philosophizethis.org/transcript/episode-222-transcript