I like to read a chapter or so just before going to sleep. Usually I read a book with spiritual content, and listen to hear if God has something to say to me.
Lately I have been wrestling with the snail’s pace that certain areas of my life seem to be moving. I have a tremendous desire to just get on with it, to press forward so I can see some results.
I go back to God quite often to check in, to see if I’m still on the right path. I often do this checking by reading the works of others to see if something resonates with me.
A paragraph that I read last night is one that I have probably read a dozen times, but this time it jumped out to me. It was so profound that the book itself might as well have spoken audibly.
And so the first command comes first. God tells us to love him with all our hearts and all our souls, all our minds and all our strength. It’s not a burden but a rescue, a trail out of the jungles of desire. When we don’t look for God as our true life, our desire for him spills over into our other desires, giving them an ultimacy and urgency they were never intended to bear. We become desperate, grasping and arranging and worrying over all kinds of things, and once we get them, they end up ruling us. It’s the difference between wants and needs. All we truly need is God. Prone to wander from him, we finally need all sorts of other things. Our desire becomes insatiable because we’ve taken our longing for the Infinite and placed upon finite things. God saves us from the whole mimetic mess by turning our hearts back to him.
– John Eldredge, Desire, (2007) pg 176.
Of course! How many times have I heard the verse “Delight yourself in the LORD, and he will give you the desires of your heart” (Psalm 37:4, ESV)? Probably well over a hundred.
It sounds so good doesn’t it? Like one of those promises you see on a desktop calendar. The problem is that I just never found it true for me. Sure, I think God is great and all, but I don’t see Him giving me “the desires of my heart.”
I had to come to grips with one brutal fact: I had entered God into a popularity contest. Yes, God is great in my life, but when it comes to the matters of the heart, can I really say that God is first in my life?
Deep down I really just want to rely on myself and my drive to get through all the tough spots. I don’t really want to throw myself at anyone’s feet to ask for help.
But this is precisely the crux of the issue. It really is about our recognizing that we are dependent upon Him.
What never hit me until I read this paragraph last night was that once we decide that God really is all we need in life, once He has the place as the true head of our lives, only then is it safe for God to give us the desires of our heart.
If He gave us our desires without His having the proper place in our lives, then our career or our children or our hobbies could begin to own us.
In the late 80’s Robin Williams starred in a brilliant movie titled, Dead Poets Society.
The movie was almost solely responsible for reviving the phrase Carpe Diem (Seize the Day). In a brilliant scene early in the movie, Williams, portraying teacher John Keating, takes his class into the hallway for a brief lesson on the importance of life.
He leads them to the trophy case where each boy from this elite preparatory school stares blankly at fading black and white photos from athletes in their glory days, trophies from long-ago victories sit tarnished behind glass. Keating implores the boys…
They’re not that different from you, are they? Same haircuts. Full of hormones, just like you. Invincible, just like you feel. The world is their oyster. They believe they’re destined for great things, just like many of you, their eyes are full of hope, just like you. Did they wait until it was too late to make from their lives even one iota of what they were capable? Because, you see gentlemen, these boys are now fertilizing daffodils. But if you listen real close, you can hear them whisper their legacy to you. Go on, lean in. Listen, you hear it? – – Carpe – – hear it? – – Carpe, carpe diem, seize the day boys, make your lives extraordinary.
That scene itself is enough to make a person drop everything and go climb a mountain. It is the best of feel-good moments. And here, my friends, is where we need to have our heads clear on one very important thing.
It is just one moment.
You may have started down a new path full of excitement, ready to make things happen. Then, some months or years into it, you find that everything has just gone…sideways. Maybe it is your health. Your aging parents. Your adult children. A situation at work.
We will need more than just one moment to sustain us.
A more sustainable way to seize the day
As we stand in our own hallway, looking at an empty trophy case were our dreams should be, a pithy one-liner from a desktop calendar just won’t make everything better. The best movie in the world will only last us a few hours.
In my 20’s, my orientation was all about filling my trophy case with a good job and an important title. Sure, I was able to put my share of achievements in the case, but as I moved through my 30’s, God upended all that. It was my personal Great Purge.
In my early 40’s I regained my composure.
[callout]”Seize the day” is now replaced with “living well”.[/callout]
I’m realizing now that my motivation isn’t coming from what I think I can become, or from a fear of not reaching my potential.
My motivation now comes from the contributions I can make, using the gifts I have been given, for the people God sends me.
It is not so much an all-out push to seize the day as it is an intentional seeking of living well inside my design. I am completely free to be who I am which frees me from acting like someone I’m not. No more striving.
The Great Purge, as miserable as it was, gave me far more resolution than I could have ever gained through a book or some “developmental assignment” at work.
What better thing can you do for your career, your sanity and for your family than to live from the design you were given, walking step by step with the One who designed you?
Take stock of how full, good and rich your life really is. For just a moment to count all the things that make your life a little easier. Consider the simple things such as:
indoor plumbing
hot water for your shower
a refrigerator / kitchen/ pantry stocked with food
grocery stores
paved roads
family
friends
heat
My in-laws are in town today for my daughter’s birthday. Before I went to work my wife and her mother had gone to get groceries at a specialty health-conscious store across town. Note that the local big box store which is designed to meet the needs of a wide mass of consumers, does not carry exactly what my wife needs. She drives, in one of our two cars, on roads that are paved, to the speciality store across town.
I sit here in a coffee store (an entire store devoted to coffee?) writing on a computer that I can carry anywhere. I have the time to do this because I am not washing a week’s worth of clothes by hand, and I’m not having to plow a field with a team of 2 horses. This amount of “free time” I have would have been unfathomable 100 years ago.
My father-in-law volunteered to watch my daughter while I work in my “office” just a few miles from the house. Thinking about things from his vantage point, how amazing is it to live so long that you get to spend time with your grandkids? As I was pulling out of the driveway on my way to write I realized that we live very long, full lives. We have so many conveniences compared to what was available in the past. These conveniences wash our dishes, dry our clothes and give us, well, more. More time, more availability, more room to give. As a whole, we are better equipped to meet the needs of others than perhaps any other time in history.
We have full, wonderful, productive lives. Today, take time to notice how good you have it.
This is the 3rd post in a series that I am writing on God’s redeeming our every day work lives (article 1 and article 2). The series started when I came across a presentation by Dr. Denise Daniels of Seattle Pacific University.
After the fall came redemption, and this carries through to our time at work.
Until reading this presentation I had been of the opinion that the fall had doomed us to work in jobs that were monotonous, tedious and boring. Dr. Daniel’s presentation covered the fall, yet it made me realize that God, in fact, has redeemed work.
Dr. Daniels includes a vital observation on slide 22.
Your work can bring economic justice and social justice to people who can not speak for themselves.
Consider for a moment the considerable rise of social entrepreneurs over the past decade — organizations such as Charity:Water and LoveGrows. Charity:Water provides clean drinking water for those who otherwise would not have the means to obtain it. Clean water leads directly to better health for the villagers and improves education opportunities for girls and women. LoveGrows helps provide orphans with housing and access to age-appropriate schooling. Both organizations seek to create a cycle of empowerment at a local level.
These are not organizations that started as well-funded offshoots of major corporations or endowment funds. These are organizations that are started from people who simply said “I want to make a difference”, and they chose to get involved despite the many issues that lay before them.
The work that you do can have an amazing impact on the lives of many.
References
Daniels, D. (2008). Redeeming work: Living out God’s Purpose in our work [PowerPoint slides]. Retrieved from http://www.spu.edu/depts/sbe/cib/documents/CIB_Kiros_Redeeming_Work_Daniels_7-08.ppt
