Life Talk with Craig Lounsbrough

Discouragement - Being Dense to Discouragement

Discouragement.  We all know it well because we've experienced it so many times.  We watch the world wildly spin as a result of foolish decisions, self-aggrandizing leaders, misguided movements, and abandoned values.  We watch jobs crash, marriages evaporate, children run rouge, friendships dissolve, and dreams die.  We've watched it all happen, and we stand discouraged beyond words to explain.

Yet, how do we learn to live in a manner where we can find strength to engage our discouragement?  How we can exist living being well aware that life will be full of discouragement, but that discouragement need not be the thing that causes us to surrender?  How do we find sufficient hope to press forward, fight the battles, bring the change, and make this existence better in light of everything that's working so hard to make it worse?  How do we do that?  It's by deciding how we will view things.  It's determine what our perspective is going to be.  It's not about being foolhardy or foolish or naive.  But it's about looking at our world in a way that we will become "dense to discouragement." 

The Discarded Power of Ethics, Morals and Values

We have adopted a "progressive" mentality that has resulted in the discarding of anything that we feel will inhibit the agenda of the progressive mindset.  There appears to be a wholesale realignment of our culture that has resulted in a frequently thoughtless and often reckless abandonment of whatever would appear to be obstructive to the frequently unclear objectives of this movement.

One of these appears to be a longstanding set of culturally accepted ethics, morals and values.  These have been incessantly cast as antiquated and outdated, having served our culture well in another time where these were actually needed.  It is assumed that the progressive nature of our supposedly progressive culture no longer needs these.  In fact, they are believed to be inhibiting to a culture solidly on the move.  Yet, to be truly progressive is to realize that to truly move forward we must do so with parameters not constructed by the agenda of the moment, but ethics morals and values that have been shaped by God to serve all moments.  If we are to forge into the unknown, we must do so guided by a set of things that are known.  Otherwise, we will find our culture where we never wished it to be and we will blame that outcome on what something it was never meant to be.

Purpose in Pain - Finding Meaning in the Tough Times

Pain is anything but random.  It is the precursor to growth and it contains within itself the very ingredients for that growth.  It's opportunity that we would much prefer to pass on, but it's opportunity nonetheless.  Sometimes the pain is horrific, at other times it's simply irritating.  Pain most certainly runs the gamut.  But regardless of the intensity with which it befalls us, it is opportunity knocking and growth waiting to happen.

Despite all of that, we tend to see pain as nothing but pain.  We attach misfortune to it.  We often see it as the result of someone else's selfish or foolish choices.  It is the worst of fate unleashed at the worst of times.  It interrupts our momentum, steals our joy, ransacks our hope, and pillages our hearts.  And because it does all of that and more, we see no value in it at all.  But value is there.  Opportunity for growth sits waiting in the smoke and ashes.  Pain is painful, sometimes beyond words to describe.  But it is also opportunity.  

Liberty - It's Not Something That Just Is

Too often we don’t appreciate what we didn’t work for or had to sacrifice for in one way or another.  Hand something to us with no effort exerted on our part to acquire it, and we’ll probably exhibit some scantily shallow and rather quickly fleeting degree of appreciation for it.  But make us work for something and expend actual energy in order to obtain it, and we’ll likely hold it with noticeably more importance.  Force us to step it up and sacrifice for some cause to the point that we lose something desperately cherished in the pursuit and it becomes valuable above and beyond most other things.  Press us to the edge and put us in a position where we actually risk dying for something and that this one cherished shot that we have at life hangs in a frighteningly precarious balance, that ‘something’ becomes indescribably priceless.  

If we didn’t give something in order to obtain something, then we’re probably holding it rather loosely and with some inexcusable degree of disregard.  If there’s not some work or sacrifice or risk in the exchange, then the greatest gifts imaginable can experience the greatest disregard conceivable.  Taking great things for granted is little more than taking them to a grave from which we can never reclaim them.  Liberty is one of those things.

A Work Ethic - What's Ours?

Do we know what a work ethic is, much less abide by one?  In a culture of entitlement and rights mongering we seem to have lost a work ethic, We've come to assume that we're 'owed' which simply means that work as a concept has become unimportant or possibly irrelevant.  And if that's the case, a work ethic itself becomes irrelevant and therefore non-existent.  A clear and responsible ethic can drive us to great things both for us and for those around us. It can powerfully assist us in achieving what we will never achieve in pursuing an attitude of entitlement.  Lack of a work ethic leaves us without the motivation or drive to maximize our abilities and raise ourselves to heights we otherwise couldn't imagine.  This brief video outlines both the need for a work ethic and the key ingredients of a potent and motivating ethic.

Positive Thinking - Or Just the Truth

We tend to talk about positive thinking as opposed to negative thinking.  We associate negative thinking with depression, darkness and an overall pessimistic view of life.  Negative thinking can be our way to avoid failure, offset our defeats by setting them up to happen, and reduce our expectations to some point so incredibly low that anything that happens can't help but be a success.  We can certainly find great value in such a dynamic, but in many respects such an orientation is far too limiting.  While the idea of positive thinking is certainly powerful, it appears to miss a more fundamental and core principle that can be utterly life altering on every level of life.  This podcast explores the idea of positive thinking or just plain truth.  

The Bottom Line - What Drives Our Decisions

We make decisions all day, everyday.  Whether those decisions are the redundant routine things that fill up most of our days, or those decisions are the seminal moments that alter our lives for the rest of our lives.  Some of the decisions that we make are conscious; choices that are the product of much time, rigorous thought, the balancing out of potential consequences, weighing the pro’s and con’s, performing analysis sometimes to the point of paralysis, and drawing on whatever our resources might be to make the best possible decision.  Sometimes our decisions are well researched,talked about, prayed about, stewed over, mulled over, poured over and turned over in our heads until our heads hurt. 

It seems that the real truth of the matter is that the things that drive our decisions are much less about the reality of whatever those decisions are and much more about our underlying value system.  What drives our decisions is something much more core to who we are. The chemistry and alchemy of our decisions arises from core values that shape our perception and our thinking. To say that our choices are nothing more than a mix of all the stuff of whatever our present options represent cheapens the ability we have as humans to make powerful decisions in the most difficult of situations.  We’re driven less by the realities of what we’re facing, and more by the core values, beliefs and deep within us.  So therefore we might ask, "What does drive our decisions and do we want those things driving them?"

What Do You Say at Times Like These?

What do you say in the midst of crisis?  What do you say when everything is turning sideways and the world around you in roiling in some sort of perpetual chaos?  What do you say?  What do you say when the pain is overwhelming, the solution is underwhelming, and the path out of whatever this place is doesn't exist?  What do you say when the bottom drops out, the sky falls in, and we're left in a free-fall that's bottomless?  What do you say?

There is much to be said in times such as these.  Much.  The problem is we don't think about it.  We get worn-down by worn-out platitudes, or the empty promises of a lost culture, or the propaganda of the various soothsayers that run rampant throughout our culture.  We mope around in the muck and mire of the anemic pablum of people who are more lost than we are.  But there are things that we can say.  Great things.  Healing things.  Timeless things.  Hopeful things.  What do you say at times like these?  Listen and find out.

Magnificent Living - Taking Things for Granted

Aldous Huxley pointedly pointed out that “most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.”  If you think about it, “infinite” is a rather extensive capacity and we‘re quite adept at utilizing that capacity to its fullest extent.  Taking things for granted means that they no longer garner our attention.  Out of their value to us they’ve lost their value.  Because of the fact they they’ve served us quite well and that they’ve served us quite consistently, we develop the sense that they’ll always be there, or that they’re just supposed to be there.  We assume that things occupy a place in our lives just because they’re supposed to occupy a place.  We make things something more like an entitlement or something we’d ascribe to the norm.  And so, we take things for granted.

The incongruity of it all is simply that things that should demand our attention, or are at least deserving of it are ignored.  Gifts, talents and personal abilities are exercised day in and day out but aren’t seen in the exercising anymore . . . at all.  Because they’re not seen, they aren’t cherished as we are quick to forget that which we’ve rendered invisible.   People or resources or abilities that should be held in high regard or seen as a privilege are categorized as the stuff of ‘stuff.’  Through inattention and the amassing of whole bunch of stuff which is largely nothing more than a whole bunch of stuff, we take things for granted.  That fundamentally means that it’s fallen off our radar under the pretense that it just is.

As we meander along and do that, things gradually fall unnoticed behind an invisible veil where all of these things are smack-dap in front of us but are completely invisible to us.  As they fall behind the veil of taking things for granted, their presence in our lives remains entirely unchanged, yet because of their invisibility their worth or value, which is sometimes terribly immense, is lost.  We walk around with precious things, and precious people, and precious resources, and precious talents that are entirely invisible and therefore ignored.

We don’t often think of actions that show us as rich; that seize the strength and wonder of our inherent humanity and cause us to do great things.  We miss the fact that sometimes just getting through a typical day requires feats of strength, tenacity, courage and outright determination.  Most often life’s about survival and getting ahead, if we can even pull these off.  But we tend not to think that the commonplace and mundane are quite often feats of great wonder, drawing from deep within us abilities that we’ve taken for granted.

Is it possible that the mundane is really the marvelous in quiet disguise?  Have you ever considered the possibility that great feats may really be nothing more than an intentional and focused use of the resources that existed within the person . . . resources that we likely have an ample and similar supply of ourselves?  Have we allowed the marvelous within us to be taken for granted so that its dollar value has been degraded to pennies when in reality it’s all priceless beyond any collection of pennies regardless of how massive?  And are we in a place where we need to consider all of this because we’ve underpriced and marginalized our worth through the persistent effort of taking things for granted?

Taking Things for Granted By Mental Laziness

So we’re robbed and we’re the culprits that did it.  We’ve used the highly effective tool of taking things for granted.  Part of our taking things for granted involves our dogged mental and emotional laziness.  Things of true worth in life don’t clamor for our attention.  They don’t attempt to seize the stage of our lives in some brazen display, touting their worth as they strut back and forth across that stage.  Rather, the things of true worth are to be sought out, looked for, and discovered in a passionate search for the stuff of life that genuinely holds the stuff of life.  It’s a rejection of all the plastic and veneers; all the things that attempt to replicate the real stuff.  It takes effort to find the things of real value; great and unrelenting effort that we often don’t want to exert.  Plastic and veneers are much, much easier so we’ve got loads of them.  We take for granted ‘taking things for granted.’

Taking Things for Granted By Entitlement

And then there’s the whole “I’m owed” mentality.  Things are just because they’re supposed to be.  This whole deal we call life is obviously supposed to come with all the finery and accessories.  It’s just part of the package.  It’s just supposed to be.  So why value something when it’s not a gift, or a treat, or a surprise, or a bonus, or just a nice addition that somebody thought would tickle our fancy?  In whatever way, shape or form that extra stuff comes in, it’s a bit of icing on the cake of entitlement, but it’s not the cake.  The cake is just supposed to be and so it is.  Entitlement is magically toxic, tragically transforming blessings to bare-bones stuff and priceless gifts to allocated accessories that are ours solely by virtue of our birth.  We take for granted ‘taking things for granted.’

Taking Things for Granted By Permission

It’s quite amazing how many things we can give ourselves permission to do.  Sometimes what we give ourselves permission to do is to tolerate what we shouldn’t, which is likely the worst kind of permission we grant ourselves.  Tolerating something implies that we probably shouldn’t be doing it in the first place but we’ve chosen to do it anyway.  There’s a dash of ignorance and a pound or two of stupidity in a lot of the permission that we grant ourselves.  There’s a turning away, a bit of ethical ‘sleight of hand’ and some mental ‘nip and tuck’ that numbs us enough so that we can pass on our integrity without really feeling that we’ve passed.  So we give ourselves permission to take a whole lot of things for granted.  We repeat this to the point that we take for granted ‘taking things for granted.’

Taking Things for Granted Because It’s the Norm

Sometimes we look around us and we try to find people doing the things that we’ve questioned doing.  Somehow, if someone else is doing the stuff we find questionable, their actions lend whatever they’re doing just enough legitimacy to do it.  If someone else is doing it, we sometimes feel that we can step over the line just enough to dabble in the behavior and then jump back to the other side of that line.  So, in a world that sloughs things off, we do the same.  We take for granted what those around us take for granted.  They reinforce our actions and we reinforce theirs.  In time we don’t even realize what we’re doing and we take for granted ‘taking things entirely for granted.’

Breaking the Habit

Magnificent living involves not taking the magnificent for granted.  It’s a refusal to marginalize the wonder of life by placing it behind some veil, invisible and lost.  

Loving Our Enemies - See Ourselves in Our Response

We get attacked.  That’s a reality of life.  Somewhere, at some time, someone is going to come after us.  We’ve going to get cut, clobbered or end up with an assorted collection of contusions.  Sometimes the intentions of those that hurt us are misdirected, and at other times they’re completely intentional.  Sometimes the actions of others are the stuff of mindless impulse and therefore kind of shot-gun in their intention.  At other times the actions of others are completely malicious, being viciously planned and savagely implemented.  There are times when the actions of others are based on an errant understanding of events or circumstances, being tragic mistakes and gross misfires.  At others times the intent is simply to hurt so the nature of the precipitating event is altogether irrelevant, other than being a product of cruelty and by-product of selfishness.  When these things happen, we naturally respond.  Yet, what does our response say?    

Obviously we respond.  We respond to a whole bunch of things in a whole bunch of ways.  Oddly, our response is often not analyzed because we assume it to be normal or appropriate given whatever it is that we’re responding to. If we do in fact analyze our response, it’s often because we thought that our response was too pensive and tentative, or we thought it was a too bit robust and overwhelming.  In other situations, we might think that our response was completely misdirected or somehow inappropriate given the situation. Then there are the situations where we feel that we shouldn’t have responded at all when we did in fact respond, or we chose not to respond when we should have.  

However we respond, we respond.   Whether that’s a response that’s thought ou tor thoughtless, we respond.  Our focus then tends to be solely on our response, whether it’s a good response, a bad response, or a rather irrelevant response. It seems that we tend to analyze our response instead of analyzing what our response says about us.  There’s this crafting, managing and executing of our response, but really nothing about what the response tells us about us.  We might be wise to quit looking solely at the response, turn things over on their backside, and ask what our response says about us.  What does the nature and type and kind o response say about who we are?  What does the intensity and direction and flavor of our response suggest about who or what we are at our core?

 

A Bit of Analysis

Fulke Greville wrote that “No man was ever so much deceived by another as by himself.”  That should create a whole lot of caution within each of us.  Of all the people that we interact with, it is ourselves that we should be analyzing the most.  We really can’t afford to live our lives walking in the darkness as if the darkness is the only thing that we can walk in.  We can ill-afford to do things like some brainless simpleton, assuming that doing them is just doing them.  Truth be known, we’re much, much more complex than that. 

There’s a tendency in human behavior to respond without asking why we’re responding the way that we are.  Maybe it’s something primitive, something that has to do with the whole concept of fight verses flight.  When it comes to survival, we don’t necessarily have the luxury of stepping back and pondering what we’re doing.  Or maybe it’s more about convenience; that stopping and thinking and contemplating takes time and energy, and maybe in the rush of it all, it’s just messy and inconvenient.  Or maybe we don’t really want to understand why we’re doing what we’ve doing.  Maybe that will uncover some less than complimentary things about us that we’d prefer not to know.  Yet, we need to know.

 

What Our Responses Reveal

 

Insecurities

Often our responses reflect our deep-seated, gnawing insecurities.  In some instances those insecurities result in a response that’s wildly disproportionate and entirely over the top. In responding like that, we insure that whatever or whoever’s attacked us is sufficiently repelled or annihilated altogether.  At other times we don’t respond at all, fearing that if we do we’re likely to incur further attacks or more abuse.  So we run and we hide.

 

Immaturity

Sometimes are responses are entirely misdirected, mis-allocated and misapplied; in other words it’s all reflexive and nothing of reflection.  We may not have the maturity to fully understand exactly what happened to us and why it happened to us.  We may not have developed the depth of intellect, insight and the balance of maturity to render a response that’s appropriate to the offense. So, if our response is rather wild, we might be immature.

 

Impatience

We do tend to be an impatient lot.  Impatience simply means that we want some sort of result in the ‘right now.’ Impatience means that we forfeit thinking in favor of doing.  We forfeit gathering data in favor of doing the deed.  We strike out instead of strategize.  Our impatience drives us to an immediate, reflexive action that will likely serve to enflame a situation that we’re attempting to douse.  If our response is knee-jerk, we’re likely impatient.

 

Selfishness

Many times our response is deliberately directed to meet our need or serve our agenda. In the fuming mindset of retaliation we take little if any time to consider the collateral damage of our choices. Nothing happens in isolation.  If we ignorantly act as if that were the reality, we’re simply slogging around in the egocentric backwaters of selfishness. If our actions are all about self-preservation and they spurn the common good, we’re likely selfish.

 

Moral Shallowness

Most of the time, our responses will challenge our ethics and our morals.  When we respond to an attack, the most devastating, brutal and agonizing responses are likely unethical.  If we really want to ravage someone and leave the landscape of their lives scorched and barren, that action will probably be immoral, or so close to immoral that we’d be stupid to engage it.  If we really want to wail on somebody and drive them so far into the ground that they’ll never crawl out, we’ll probably have to stuff our ethics, turn a blind eye and live with the guilt of it all for the rest of our lives.

 

What Our Responses Say About Us

Don’t just respond, even though that’s the easy thing to do.  Ask what your response says about you.  Let your responses cause you to respond to you. Ask the hard questions.  Do the tough analysis.  Face yourself.  You will be a better person who leaves behind a better world even when that world attacks you.  

 

 

Passionate for the Right Things

The question is not, "Am I passionate?"  The better question might be, "Am I passionate for the right things?"  There's a lot of passionate people in our world today, but often the passions are misguided and self-destructive.  People take up questionable causes and advocate for selfish positions in the name of 'passion.'  Voices are raised, positions are advocated for, and pulpits of all shapes and colors are pounded.  But 'passion' may not be productive.  And so, as we advocate for our 'passions,' we might ask how healthy and legitimate our 'passion' really is.  For many 'passions' result in our destruction, and we would be wise to make certain this is not the case with any of ours. 

Releasing Your Grip - Possessing Life is Letting Life Possess You

Holding onto something?  Of course you are.  We all do. There are things that we feel are of great value, for whatever reason they’re of value.  Our tendency is that once we determine that something’s of value, or we’re told something’s of value, we tend to grab ahold of it.  The degree to which we grab it and the force of our grip on it is determined by how much we value whatever it is that we’re holding onto.  Because that’s the case, our grip can be something like a horrific steel trap, or it can be rather loose and supple.  

What’s odd is that we don’t often think about how hard we’re holding onto whatever things we’re holding onto.  We presume that it’s a natural and normal thing to hold onto the things in our lives that we value or see as central to our lives.  We misleadingly assume that  once we’re in possession of whatever it is that we’re in possession of, we’re obviously supposed to always remain in possession of it.  We develop a kind of hoarding management mentality that naturally dictates that we hold onto things that serve us in some fashion,or contribute to our lives in whatever way they contribute.  The bizarre workings of our minds can cause us to hold onto things that don’t serve us at all and are simply dead and pathetically decaying weight.  The fact that we possess things causes us to assume that we’re supposed to keep them.  What else would we do with them?  We assume that holding onto things is natural and needed and necessary and obviously normal.  Is it? 

What Determines What We Grab

So we inventory what we have in our lives; people, assets, careers, friendships, dreams, goals, relationships, material possessions, various resources . . . all of the sordid stuff that we have in our possession.  Then we assign each of those things some sort of value based on a grid intricately and tediously constructed from our goals, our value system, our present position in life, whatever threats or risks we perceive that we have, our sense of security or lack thereof, our self-esteem or any myriad number of determining factors.  Then our grip on these things is determined by the value we assess them as having. 

We also inventory what we don’t have in our lives but want to have.  We look outside the realm of our possessions to those things that we want to bring within our realm.  Whether those things are fiscal assets, material possessions, various relationships at various levels of relationship, career goals molded by our aspirations, the square footage of our home, the reach of our influence, our place in some social food chain, or the smoothness of the image we want to project to those around us.  Whatever we want, in whatever way we’ve determined we want it will likewise determine the degree of our grip on that thing.  Likewise, whatever we’ve determined we want will also determine the degree of our grip on the things that it will take to get it.  We’re all about the business of grabbing something to secure our possession of it, or maneuver ourselves in order to get it. 

What About Grip?

It’s interesting that the harder we hold onto something, the more likely we are to kill it.  We assume that strengthening our grip insures the continued possession of whatever we’re holding onto.  Indeed, our possession is in all probability insured.  However, what we don’t realize is that we’ll possess it, but it’ll likely be empty and dead.  Things that are of real value in life can’t be held like that.  The oddity of it all is that the very things that we want to possess; the things that we vigorously expend our lives in some helter-skelter rampage to possess, those very things are killed in the possession.  All of that seems terribly contradictory, but it’s terribly true.  How many times have we held firmly onto something only to lose it anyway despite the iron grip we had on it?  In how many instances have we gone to great lengths and dizzying heights to insure the continued possession of something,only to have it slip right through our fingers? How many times have we rigorously secured something by nailing it down,fencing it in, sealing it tight, cinching it firmly, locking it down hard,insuring it, putting it in a trust, or somehow solidly encasing in some tedious manner or fashion only to lose it despite the aggressiveness of our efforts?  

What Do We Possess?

Yet, there are times when we feel we haven’t lost something despite our grip on it; that we’re still in possession of it and we have it stored away in whatever vault we store things away in.  We point to those things as evidence that holding onto things doesn’t necessarily result in the loss of them.  We’re confident that we can grab ahold of things with an iron grip and despite the iron grip keep them very much alive.  Yet, can we possess something and kill it in the possession.  Do the great and wonderful things die if they’re held?  Is there something about the precious and sacred that in order to live they must be free?  Once it’s dead, what is it that we possess?  How many dreams have we achieved but have seen so many other things die in the effort to achieve them?  And once the dream is hauled into the boat of our lives as some mammoth catch, does it flounder at the bottom of our boats and then expire in the rancid air of captivity?  

We can hold on to many things and point to them to show that we’re still in possession of them, but really not be in possession of them at all.  Things that we grip firmly lose their life and are irrevocably sapped of their vitality.  They become depleted and hold no interest for us anymore, entirely losing their luster and appeal.  The things that are left after we hold onto them are more often than not empty carcasses and hollow shells that have the illusion of life, but none of the essence. 

Possession Is Found in Not Possessing

If we want to embrace life, we must never set traps for it or cage it.  We must understand that it is in the wildness of living that we live.  It’s in the privilege of observing life in all its unbridled passion and surging forcefulness that we are enriched and gorged in the enriching.  Possessing life can only happen in not possessing it. Possessing life is observing it and then romping and frolicking right along with it.  In reality, it’s letting life possess you.  It’s giving life permission to have its way with you, not demanding your way with it through the possession of it.  Possession of this thing we call life is giving up the possession of ourselves and our rights to possession and handing that over something infinitely bigger than us.  Surrendering ourselves and letting ourselves be in the possession of life is the secret to possessing life. 

So, what are you holding onto?  Whatever it is, it’s going to die.  Maybe you need to free yourself to be in the possession of something greater in you and realize that everything that you’ve looked to have in the mad race of possession is all right there.     

Loving Our Enemies - More Than a Nice Idea

Life has those lingering proverbial statements that seem timeless; those quips and quotes that have that some kind of message that’s just so compelling that you simply can’t ignore them.  Whatever they say, and there’s a bunch of them that say a whole lot of things, they say something that’s so core to us,or who we’d like to be that secretly we’d love to be able to live them out.  It seems that because they have something genuinely real to them they persist indefinitely because they’re indefinitely fresh and relentlessly applicable. 

However, it seems that these timeless, proverbial treasures are so good that they’re too good to be true, or least too good to be achievable.  We’d really love to be able to actually do what they say and live like they suggest, but they’re pretty demanding and rigorous.  In fact, they’re sometimes so demanding and so rigorous that they seem a bit impossible.  Yet, they remain compelling nonetheless, like some precious gem just beyond our reach.

Love Your Enemies

The command to love our enemies is clearly one of those things.  It certainly sounds nice.  It would probably relieve a whole lot of our stress.  It would likely make the world that “kinder, gentler” kind of place.  It would probably diffuse a whole lot of stuff and smooth over things before any real damage is done.  Yeah, but how realistic is that command that really?  Face it; we live in the 21^st century.  Look around.  It’s not a “kinder, gentler” kind of world.  Rather, it’s a place where we need to be on our guard and protect ourselves or we’re eventually going to ‘ground round’ in some situation with someone sooner or later. 

Taking that thinking a bit further, how do we love the people who are beating us up in any number of ways that we get beat up?  In fact, is loving them even remotely reasonable as that seems to imply that we’re somehow giving their actions a degree of permission or legitimacy. Aren’t we telling the offender that their offenses are okay?  It also seems to suggest that we’re up for further offenses and that we’ve become something of the proverbial ‘doormat’ in our relationship with whomever wants to walk on us.     

Oscar Wilde said “always forgive your enemies - nothing annoys them so much.” That sounds kind of appealing in a sneaky kind of way because that’s really about a covet kind of revenge.  In actuality, that’s more a sinister way of getting back at our offenders without them really knowing that we’re getting back at them.  That’s not about love. 

I think we move closer to something of substance in the words of an unknown author who wrote, “The face of the enemy frightens me only when I see how much it resembles me.”  That should give us pause . . . probably a whole lot of pause.  There’s another proverbial statement that says that what we hate in others is really what we hate in ourselves.  The hatred for our enemies may well be the characteristics in them that we see in ourselves.  It would seem that that should start to reorient our thinking a bit.

The Cost to Our Enemies

What we don’t consider is the cost our enemies pay in being exactly that . . . our enemies.  Being our enemy demands that people do things or carry out certain actions that make them our enemies in the first place.  Our enemies are not enemies without some sort of decision or action that makes them our enemies.  Something was done, or some event transpired, or some situation was initiated that clearly put them in a starkly adversarial position relative to us.  In other words, they had to do something to become our enemies. 

And that action, whatever it was, had to be severe enough to rupture, smash or entirely decimate our relationship with them.  Their actions had to be sufficiently toxic to set them completely at odds with us.  Something pretty significant had to transpire to polarize our relationship with them and put us at the opposite end of spectrum in some sort of adversarial stand-off. Something pretty bad had to have been done by our enemy. 

What we think about is the cost of that action to us.  In fact, we tend to be all over that.  We can easily and quite extensively tell people how bad it was, how much it hurt, how unfair it was, and how uncalled for the actions were. We can recite all of that with great ease. 

What we don’t think about is the cost to our enemy in doing what they did to us. Of course we don’t.  We probably don’t have a whole lot of interest in going over that because we’d prefer to lick our wounds in light of the abuses that were perpetrated upon us.  The abuses levied against us get all of our attention and the majority of our emotional airtime.  It’s not that we shouldn’t deal with those things, but they become our entire focus. 

Yet, perpetrating these things upon us comes with a cost to the person doing those things to us.  In fact, it’s likely that the cost to our enemies for whatever it is they’ve done to us is greater than the cost of those actions upon us.  We don’t see the cost to our enemies because we’re the ones in pain. We assume that the level of pain we’re experiencing reflects the cost, and it’s likely that our enemy is not in pain. In fact, they might be downright happy and somewhat elated about what they’ve done to us. 

However, there are consequences for how we live our lives; deep, profound and devastating consequences.  Many times those consequences aren’t reflected in the pain someone is experiencing and they’re not necessarily reflected in whatever the outcome of the moment is.  Most consequences are much deeper, something like a slow acidic burn that gradually eats away at the edges of our souls; killing us in small degrees so that we die a slow, unrecognized death.  There’s a conscience ignored that will eventually have its day. There’s the reality that nothing that’s ever done in isolation and that when we sow pain, or betrayal, or abandonment, or any other destructive thing it will affect everything else around us.  Then there’s the reality of time and circumstance that simply means that what we visit upon others will eventually be visited upon us.  And finally, there’s the numbing action that occurs when we act in hateful and deceitful ways; a numbing that robs the robber of the essence of their humanity, therefore robbing them of the whole of life. 

There are terrible consequences that are tantamount to the destruction of the offender’s life.  In harming us they are in turn harming themselves in ways that they cannot imagine; ways that they would likely repent of if they could only see it.  And so, we need to attend to our own pain, but in understanding the loss to our enemy we can find a place to love them. 

 

Love - A World Without It

What would the world be like if there were no love?  It's probably not all that unreasonable to say that without love, the world may not exist...at all.  Without love, mankind would likely destroy itself in all the sordid ways that love keeps us from destroying it.  Love is essential.  Absolutely.  Love embodies not only love, but a host of other principles and values that hold-the-line against our lesser urges and less than admirable traits.

A world without live wouldn't be a great place at all.  And so maybe we should ask how we create more of it.  How do we enhance the love in our world?  How do we strengthen the love that exists, and yet expand the scope and impact of it far beyond what it is?  And while such notions often sound idealistic and the stuff of romanticized dreamers, what would actually happen if love were expanded?  What would happen if it took a greater place in our lives, our families and our communities?  What if?

To Love or Not to Love - That's the Question

It seems one of the oddest dichotomies. Life is full of strange and downright weird contradictions.  At many times in our lives, at many points both important and not so important we find ourselves pulled in two completely opposite, but equally compelling directions.  At times it seems that two entirely different people reside within us, each mesmerized and held captive by things completely contrary and contradictory; each aggressively vying for the thing that pulls them in opposite directions.  Of all of these kinds of moments, there is one that seems more vexing than the rest . . . and love drives it. 

We all want to love and be loved.  There's a whole lot that we can do without.  As much as we'd love to do without love at times, we're simply incapable of doing so.  There's something woven through the very core of our tapestries that desires to both expel love out and draw it in.  We'd love to do it without fear or reservation.  We'd love to be wrapped init, immersed in it and enriched by it. We'd love to have it abound to the point that we drown ourselves in it because we know that such a drowning is nothing of dying but everything of living. 

We know that a world submerged in love is a world safe, precisely balanced and warmly thoughtful.  It would be a world centered on the good, protected from the bad, a place committed to refuge and stoic inits nurturance of all.  We know that a world embedded in the giving and receiving of love would not be naive, it would be never be careless and it would always err in favor of risking for the good of others despite whatever the magnitude of the risk might be.  It would cultivate the best of our humanity and patiently reshape that which is not. 

We know that this kind of love between two people is nothing short of marvelous and mystical; something that brushes right up to the edge of our humanity and lavishly spills over into some place that we recognize we were designed to live but seldom discover, much less visit.  Love is not a reality that disappoints.  It's not some idea of fanciful dreamers or misty-eyed idealists.  It's not something spun from the pens of secluded novelists or cooked up as some idea to offset the pain in our world.  Rather, it's the only thing powerful enough to endure when everything else does not.  Love is a staunchly core reality that we rarely ever find.  And it is in missing it that we experience disappointment. 

Once Burnt, Twice Smart

Loving means risking.  There's no way around it.As with anything truly valuable in life, there's always something of risk in attempting it.  It seems that we should be able to love without the concurrent risk of being hurt in the loving.  Yet, in the reality of the world that we live in, good things stand toe-to-toe with the bad. 

So when we love, we choose to be vulnerable. In reality, there is no other choice. We must choose to open ourselves up because unless we do so, love has no place to go.  Unless we do so, it will beheld outside of us in some place where it can never 'be and do' all it was designed to 'be and do.'  Unless we open up, we will hold it at bay and long for it while it's right at our very fingertips. 

So we eye it and contemplate it and thirst after it, but we don't reach out for it.  Typically we don't reach out for it because we have before.  And in doing so before we've been burned . . . badly burned. We've been hurt, or betrayed, or back-stabbed, or abandoned or any number of other cruel things that took our hopes of love and incinerated them into something of acidic smoke and charred ashes.  "Once burnt, twice smart" as they say.  It should not have been, but i twas.  We learn never to go there again because being hurt in love always seem to far, far outweigh the love that we originally sought.

Playing it Safe and Killing Love

Much like anything in life, we can play it safe. Playing it safe doesn't mean that we will be safe.  But there's some sense that we can make it safer anyway.  Yet we insulate ourselves from love.  We want it, but the risk is too great.  We thirst for it, but we can't bring ourselves to risk for it.  We face the terrible dichotomy of wanting something so desperately, but having that core thirst for love thwarted by all the fears that come with having loved before and having been burned. 

So love goes wanting.  We create thin and shallow replacements for it so as to reduce the risk of reaching for the real thing.  We call a lot of things"love" that run the gamut from something that approximates love to things that have nothing to do with love at all.  We cheat ourselves, we cheat others and we cheat this single, precious opportunity that we have to live and love.

Love, Again and Again .. .

We need to love.  We must.  We can do so realizing that all the grievous pain of loss will never offset the wonder of love.  We can do so with wisdom, boundaries and respect.  We can walk into love with our eyes clear rather than fogged by the fraudulent love we call infatuation.  We can love responsibly so that it does not become abused and turn into something it was never meant to be.  If we cherish love, respect its power, refuse to use it for our gain, always commit it's benefits to others and are lavish in our expression of it, it will serve us well. 

And so why risk loving?  Because the risk will always be offset by love.  Done well, the risk will be always be worth the risking.  To forfeit love is to forfeit much.  "To love or not to love?"  That's up to each of us individually.  Your choice, whatever it might be, will impact you more than you may realize.

 

It's Over - When It's Not

It's over... but it's probably not.  It's not about something being over.  In reality, it's more about a negative attitude that thinks something is over when it's not.  We think that some dream is forever gone, that they'll never be another relationship, that our career objectives will always remain objectives, and that life will never fall in good places for us.  Often, we think something is over before we even start it, which doesn't make something over.  It makes something that was 'never started' to be anything but never started.

It's over...but it's probably not.  Something might be over in one way, but it can be accomplished in another.  Something might have come to an unfortunate end, but that never precludes a new beginning.  Or something might not be over at all.  Rather, we're just too hesitant to press it forward for fear that we might not actually be able to manage success.  It's not over, so hang in there.

What We Worship - The Things We Bow Down To

We all worship something.  For the strong and stalwart types among us, we probably find that statement a bit pathetic or at least somewhat unsavory at best.  For the more passive among us, that statement might make us feel more subservient and possibly more used than we already feel.  For everyone else that’s somewhere in the middle, it might resonate as slightly antiquated with a dusty touch of religious sentimentality. Regardless of where we fall or who we are, the concept of worship can cut against the grain and be seen as an action that undercuts our independence.  Worse yet, the whole idea or act of worship might usurp our independence altogether, which for many us is a rather frightening proposition. 

Often we conceptualize worship as being something that demands our obedience and allegiance.  To many, worship suggests subservience and a kind of scripted groveling where we’re irreparably stooped and bent in penance or slavery to something.  To others, it’s an action that they sense is owed to something in their lives, or it can be an action that draws one close to the object of worship.  Whatever the case, we all worship something.     

Our Need to Worship

Dorothy Thompson said that “the instinct to worship is hardly less strong than the instinct to eat.”  That’s pretty powerful.  There’s something woven and intricately threaded within us that demands that we worship.  Benjamin Disraeli framed it nicely when he said that “man is made to adore and to obey: but if you will not command him, if you give him nothing to worship, he will fashion his own divinities, and find a chieftain in his own passions.” 

There’s something core within us that needs something core above us.  So, it seems that we’re always about the process of creating something that can be that “core” thing.  In reality we’ve become quite adept at it.  In creating,cwe might ask ourselves are we creating just to create, or are we creating something to worship?  How much of our energies, our efforts and our creativity are directed toward the creation of something that’s much more than simply something that we came up with, and is actually more about something that we can look up to?  In all the scurrying about that we do in life, in all the assorted investments that we make, and in all the tedium that we’re all about, are we in reality creating something that’s big enough and sufficient enough to appear worthy of our worship? 

 Worship Implies a Throne

Worship suggests that something has been elevated above everything else.  There’s something within our lives that holds that key and sacred place; the thing that we have set on the throne of our lives. The whole concept of a “throne” suggests that each life has a place of primacy, a central location or point which everything else draws from, and around which everything is centered.  Most of us don’t think about the concept of a “throne” likely because such a notion is the stuff of antiquity; some object that we would associate with ‘pomp and circumstance.’  That imagery doesn’t really fit in our conceptualization of our lives as we live them out in the 21^st century.  A “throne” is just too eccentric and off. 

Yet, in thinking about worship it seems unpardonably imperative to embrace the understanding that we each have a central place in our lives that is second to none.  There is that place that we carefully guard, that “hill that we’re willing to die on,” that part of ourselves that’s unquestionably non-negotiable, and that thing that we feel we simply couldn’t live without.  There are those places where no one’s allowed and no one can touch.  We have that inner sanctum, that holy of holies that’s reverenced and revered.  We may not think of these places quite that way, but they’re there.  These are our thrones.

 Something on the Throne

It would seem to follow that if we’ve got a throne, and we do, that something’s probably on it.  Therein lays the great question for each of us.  What do we put on the throne?  It seems that while we have a throne, we are privileged to put on it whatever we want. Things can demand that we put them on the throne; whether that be people, or dreams, or relationships, or careers, or material objects, or religious beliefs, or the desire for status in whatever arena we desire status in.  Petitions for the throne can come from painful events, disheartening failures, any of our many wounds, or a wide array of emotional issues.  Things such as denial, hatred, bitterness and revenge can all jockey for a place on the throne.  Then there are all kinds of addictions or other destructive behaviors that will want to sit firmly on the throne so that they can exist unimpeded and unquestioned.

Ourselves on the Throne

More often than not, we put ourselves on the throne; or at least that’s what we think we put on the throne.  We want to reign supreme in the kingdom that we call “us.”  We reign with an iron scepter and we bow to no one.  Bryant H. McGill said that “self-made men often worship their creator.”  That’s quite frightening.  Yet, the throne of our lives is such a massive and sometimes overwhelming place that we’re fooled as to who’s actually on it.  It’s really not “us” that’s on it, but things we’ve put there that we think are “us.”  Often we’re deluded into believing that we’re reigning, when we’re subservient to what we’ve put on there.  Because we put these things on the throne we assume that we control them.  Yet, what we put in power, what we elevate to that position will turn and control us.  Likely one of the greatest deceptions is to firmly believe that we’re on throne when we’re not.

 

What Should We Put on the Throne?

The throne of our lives is a powerful place.  It would make crystal clear sense then to carefully determine what we put on the throne.  Often we’re not wise enough to know exactly what that should be.  Our frequent short-sightedness and hedonism are hardly suitable lenses through which to make such a choice.  It’s entirely feasible that anything that “we” put on the throne will in time turn on us, usurp us, use us, or possibly destroy us.  It’s downright possible that anything that we put on the throne will help will turn to our ill. 

Maybe it’s more about “allowing”something on the throne; something that does not demand that place, but requests it.  Maybe something that inherently seeks our good over its own. Could there be something that designed us purely for itself and us purely for it; something that is the only natural and good fit for the throne of our lives?  Is the throne of our lives custom-made for something or someone like this? Anything else on the throne will surely lead to a life that embraces the agenda of whatever it is that’s on the throne. Only one thing sits on the throne on our behalf.  So, who’s on the throne?

 

Integrity - The Stuff of Legends

As the old saying goes, integrity is defined by what you do when no one is looking.  It's a choice...pure and simple.  It's a choice to do the right thing regardless of the outcome for us.  It's realizing that we may pay a price to be people of integrity, but to 'not' be a person of integrity will cost us far, far more.  It's a lifestyle choice.  A choice of character; of determining the kind of people that we want to be and the kind of legacy that we want to leave.  It's about how we will live out these few scant years that we have to live and what our lives will look like at journey's end.

Too often integrity falls to greed, or ease, or peer pressure, or the demands of the larger culture.  But a true person of integrity understands that to fall to these is to fall in ways that we cannot afford to fall.  So, be a person of integrity.  You won't be perfect at it, and there will be moments of failure that you will regret.  But it's not always about winning the battle as much as it is refusing not to fight it.

Sacrifice - Un-Centered, Unselfish and Uncut

The concept of sacrifice seems more suited to novels or epic movies.  It appears more an ideal; a concept that when observed from a safe distance seems wonderfully heroic, deeply inspiring and chivalrous in a way that stirs up something powerful in us that seems to be forever held hostage despite the fact that it gets stirred.  Sacrifice, as we watch it displayed from afar, awakens some internal passion that chafes against our souls in its quest to be unleashed within us.

 

Somehow sacrifice seems to be something that is entirely right, that is likewise entirely lost.  There are those things that we believe exist yet are lost to mankind; the things we are ever in search of not because we are caught up in some sort of shallow fascination with them.  Rather, there are those things that we know to be authentically real whose absence must be remedied by their discovery.  There are those things that we are made for,yet which are entirely absent.

 

Sacrifice is one of those things.  It’s something that we know we are all called to.  It’s one of those things that we know is the right thing to do; that it’s part of our humanity and represents something undeniably central.  Sacrifice is the totality of our humanity called upward and outward in a grand display of selfless behavior.  It declares that we are not made solely for ourselves, but that we are made for others.  It captivates our minds and catapults our actions to do things we never dreamt possible. Indeed, it defines the core of our humanity; representing the ultimate action that one human being can take on behalf of another human being.  That’s sacrifice.

 

The Balance of Sacrifice

 

All of this doesn’t mean that our lives are always about other people. It’s simply about priority and the arrangement of things in our lives.  Our culture, and in many cases our world seems bent on maximizing our personal gains in any situation.  There appears to be an inherent mentality that the self can be sacrificed, but only to the degree that the self is not actually threatened, or threatened beyond likely recovery.  Sacrifice is calculated and made clean.  Certainly, we must exercise wisdom when we take actions on the behalf of others, but a clear set of priorities would seem to dictate the manner in which we act with others in mind.

 

Priorities

 

It seems that our actions are dictated by our priorities.  There appears to be this inherent grid that we run decisions through.  That grid seems primarily to hold the welfare of self above everything else.  Clearly,that seems to be in keeping with the natural tendencies and behaviors of base human nature. 

 

Yet, there is a sense of some deep sort that runs entirely contrary to human nature; that in putting ourselves first, we must by necessity put others first. There’s some sort of sense of community, of relationship and connection that deems us only a part of a much large whole.  And as a part of that larger whole, we are obligated to preserve the whole above the preservation of self.  That dichotomy all seems rather strange because it appears to run against our natural inclinations to make certain that we’re okay and that our personal interests are protected.

 

What’s the End-Game?

 

We all ask where we want everything to end up.  At the end of it all, when our days are over and the fullness of our time, talents and energies are spent what will be left?  That’s a terribly big, and in some cases, a terribly frightening question.

 

If our focus is upon ourselves, then the end results of our lives will be likewise focused on us.  The benefits and resources that we will have garnered and spent will serve us and us alone. That might make for a life that we perceived as satisfying and a good ride, but it ends at our end.  The service of self terminates at our own death. Therefore we will have left nothing that outlives us, nothing that serves the greater good, nothing for those who remain.  It would seem that the end-game is indeed the end-game in a manner tragic and unfortunate.

 

What About Legacy?

 

What kind of footprint will each of us leave?  Will it be big enough and broad enough that others are enriched by it and find both comfort and inspiration init?  Will it have changed lives, redirected people who were on crash courses to their own destruction, or given someone somewhere some degree of hope in a place where they saw none for themselves?  Will our legacy live on, not just for the purpose of living on but for the purpose of giving others purpose?  Are we committed to leaving something of value behind that will cost us, but will in turn be of inestimable value to someone else, someplace else?  Or are our lives spent in the service of self which means it all begins, and more tragically ends there?

 

In leaving a legacy, we can’t be so shallow as to leave a legacy of who we were as some sort of monument to self.  Monuments are not legacies, they are simply reminders.  A legacy is leaving something to others for the sole purpose that it gives them something valuable and needed in their own journey whether we are given the credit for that or not.  It’s a selfless detachment where we hand another human being something that may very well be life-saving without them knowing its origin or being able to credit the one who gave it to them.  It’s a gift that is given for no other purpose than the nature of the gift and the recipient who will receive it; the giver being entirely lost in the transaction. That is sacrifice.

 

How Will I Live?

 

Sacrifice . . . it runs contrary to who we are, but it is in reality everything that we are.  The pinnacle of our humanity is ascended when we descend in the service of others.  We are raised up when we lay ourselves down. It builds us, it builds others, and it builds families, communities and nations.  Sacrifice is the best of our humanity manifest in shining moments when everything that would diminish us is overcome and set aside.  It is all of us at our very best.  So how then will you live?

 

I Can't Save Myself

I can't save myself.  I do not possess the resources to come to my own rescue.  I might be able to do a few things to keep my life moving, or weather a few bumps in the road.  I might be able to bypass some road blocks or side-step a few ruts.  And while I can maneuver enough to slog along at points, that is not saving myself.  When it comes to the need to be rescued from the disasters that befall me, or the times when my resources pale to the struggle within which I find myself, or the challenges that possess a power far superior to any that I possess...I cannot rescue myself from any of these.  And in the end, I cannot rescue myself from certain death and the consequences that follow.  I cannot rescue myself, and I am glad that I can't.  For then I am forced to acknowledge that something or Someone greater than me must exist who can save me from the 'me' that can't save itself.

Self-Image - What's Yours?

Self-image is that perspective that we have about ourselves. It’s kind of like looking in some sort of mirror in order to determine what we look like.  We stand in front of these mirrors and try to figure out who we are, what we are and what we’re not.  We tilt our heads and squint, trying to make out the reflection of our heads, our hearts or whatever’s in there. 

We are constantly coming back to these mirrors in order to figure out who we are and what’s in there.  Conflict brings us back.  A relationship gone bad brings us back.  A job loss, financial collapse, personal failures, the upheaval of mid-life crisis or some tragedy all bring us back.  These kinds of things make us question ourselves so we’re back in front of some foggy, squiggly mirror with squinted eyes trying to get our bearings again.

Distorted Mirrors

You’ve seen the mirrors that distort your image. Those can be the kind in the Fun House at the circus on antique mirrors aged and faded by time.  The image isn’t quite right.  Sometimes it’s close and other times its way off, but it’s not accurate. 

It seems that most of the time a poor self-image is the result of a distorted mirror.  You see, we don’t make our mirrors.  Most often they’re made for us.  Key people in our lives make them.  Mom’s and Dad’s and relatives and friends and teachers and pastors and bosses make them. These people all have a hand in building the mirrors that we peer into. 

For some of us those mirrors are fairly accurate.  We were fortunate enough to have some solid people around us who knew enough about who they were to help us build accurate mirrors.  For others of us however, we came from difficult or dysfunctional situations where the mirrors got all messed up.  We were told that we were worthless.  Negative messages poured in almost relentlessly.  We were labeled, categorized, put in some sort of personally diminishing box, cataloged and stamped as inadequate, stupid, a born loser, a mistake, a burden, an object, or any of a million other destructive identities. 

Our mirrors were shaped to reflect these things back to us even if they weren’t there.  We gaze into these mirrors trying to see who we are.  Reflected back to us are distorted images emblazoned on these mirrors that have nothing to do with who we really are.  When we look in the mirror it sure looks like those things are there, but they’re not.  They’re convincing alright, but they’re not reality.  Our self-image is whittled away and eventually destroyed if we’re not able to understand that what I see is not what I am.  Rather, it’s what other people told me I am.

It’s Their Reflection

People in our lives build their reflections into our mirrors. It’s called projection. Projection is where someone places their issues on us.  It’s a convenient way to avoid dealing with our issues by putting them on someone else. And so people project their issues or their deficiencies or their quirks into our mirrors.  And when we look into those mirrors, those things distort our image.

We are not those things.  They are simply a distortion of our true selves.  Sadly, we tend to embrace them as being true about us and we incorporate them into our lives as if they are real.  They’re not.

Adjusting Our Mirror

We need to adjust our mirrors, to clean them up.  That can be done by identifying what people have put there and telling yourself that it’s their image not yours.  It’s looking closely enough to ask “whose reflection am I really seeing here?” It’s not about denying any of the bad stuff we see by attributing it to someone else.  That kind of stuff’s too easy to do.  It’s more about an honest assessment, teasing out fact from fiction and tale from truth.  Who am I really?  It’s a great question and one worth figuring out.  So . . . look in the mirror again, but look differently.      

 

How We Define Time

Time.  It's limited.  It moves without heeding our desire that it slow down or speed up.  It is not interrupted by the greatest joy or the most profound heartache.  Once it is spent, there is no redeeming it, elongating it, renewing it, or storing it.  It is a precious resource that we would be wise to use with wisdom.  And while we can't do any of those with time, we can pack many good things into it.  We can use it to change a life, restore a relationship, direct a wayward child, give a bit of time to someone who's lonely, or make a mark on the world that will carry on once our time is over.  Time.  It's precious.  But what we can do with it is precious itself.  And so, you might ask, what you will do with the time that you have.

Success - Defining It Defines Us

 

It would be pretty safe to say that all of us want to be successful.  We’re not stagnant creatures just milling about and burning time until we drop dead.  There’s something more intentional about us; something that responds to challenges and has a natural inclination to set goals, whether we actually achieve them or not.  We have a need to have a purpose; something that defines us as more than carbon-based life forms going through a series of meaningless motions on our way to the grave. We have a need to achieve, to conquer, to rise to great heights and soar.  It seems that being alive is not enough to justify our existence or lend value to that existence.  Rather, we have to make our mark and leave a timeless legacy that shouts that we were more than simply people who lived out our days.

 

This need to justify our existence naturally and most predominantly results in the need to succeed in some way.  To do that, we have to define success.  How do we know if we’ve succeeded?  What will give us a sense that we’ve accomplished something?  How will we determine how far we’ve come or how far we’ve yet to go?  Did we do it right or did we do it wrong?  To answer those questions we’ve got to define what success is.  Otherwise we have no yardstick that we can use in order to determine our progress or lack thereof.

 

How We Define Success

 

The problem for most of us is not in succeeding.  The real issue is in how we define “success.”  Whatever that definition is, it’s extremely powerful.  Our definition of success, whatever that might be, has power beyond our recognition and it has implications for us that in large part never even dawn on us.  How we define success will define what we do and how we do it.  Our definition of success will quite literally direct the whole of our energies.

 

Whatever our definition of success, it will be the thing that drives us, that determines where our energies are invested, how our resources are expended, what risks we will take, exactly what we’re going to be willing to sacrifice, and the degree to which we’ve achieved or failed.  Our definition of success becomes the yardstick by which we measure both what we do, and ultimately what we’re worth.  It can become the idol at whose feet we bow and to which the whole of our lives and our energies are sacrificially expended.  It becomes the focal point of what we do.  Therefore, our definition of success becomes terribly critical.

 

Our Definition Defines Our Value

 

Our definition of success is driven by whatever our ultimate goal is.  There are tons of goals that we could sort through and sift through and discuss and evaluate and weigh out.  However, at the core of each goal there’s typically one central goal that defines all other goals.  That fundamental goal is to have a sense that our lives have “value.” Whatever our goals are and whatever they look like, it’s likely that their main objective and their core purpose is to convince ourselves that we have value.  It’s entirely imperative that we see ourselves as having value as value justifies our existence and validates that we’re worthy of the space that we’re taking up.  Having a sense of value is core to our humanity because without it we feel empty, hollow, entirely lost and totally unworthy.  Value is indispensable.

 

The way that we convince ourselves that we have value is by convincing others that we have value.  It’s a kind of a self- inflicted ‘sales job’ where we get others to believe that we have value which in turn convinces us that we have value because until others see it in us, we can’t possibly believe we have it.  Because that’s frequently the case, as sad as that might be, our definition of success is built on and around doing something that others will look at in awe, or reverence, or be driven to emulate, or hold in high esteem, or find praiseworthy because it’s all so grand and mesmerizing.  Once others grant it value, we grant it value.  When we ever that is, has to incessantly generate outcomes that people will value so that we can stuff ourselves full of that “stuff” sufficiently enough in order feel that we have value.

 

 A Better Definition – What It Is and What It Isn’t

 

A definition of success is not so much about success as it is standards.  It’s not about accolades as much as it’s about authenticity.  It’s not about strategy, it’s about sanctity.  It’s not about where one wants to go, it’s about living well right where we are.  It’s not about what one does but who one is.  Success is based on how we chose to live which dictates what we choose to do; not the other way around.  Success is the maintenance of virtue and the life-long refining of a right heart when the world around us sees no value in either or anything else admirable for that matter. Success is a commitment to an unwavering morality for the sole purpose of morality and not for any applause that such a stance might obtain for us.

 

As Elbert Einstein put it, “Try not to become a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value.”  Success is living well and dying with that legacy left in our wake.  It’s not about how many people witnessed our living well or how many can attest to it at the end.  It’s simply that we were those things whether they were displayed in front of masses of people or lived out in the greater testing ground of total isolation where no one sees but us and God.Success is a life well lived regardless of how many trophies or certificates or promotions or contracts we got in the process of living.  The marks of real success can’t be hung on a wall, or deposited in a bank account, or used as leverage to advance a career.  Those things are more the stuff of achievement, which are good, but they’re not necessarily “success.”

 

It’s not that achieving things or diligently working for those kinds of things is bad.  They’re not. It’s simply that they’re not the hallmark of the kind of success that shapes lives; that transforms people, that rocks cultures, that calls others to higher ground and boldly exhibits something that’s far beyond the tiny confines of our human existence and something more of the character and essence of the God who created us.  Success is right living, exuberantly virtuous living, mindful living, and selfless living that combine to result in a bold living that can be stunning.   It’s all lived out without wondering how many brownie points we’re going to amass by living that way and how good it’s all going to look to everyone around us.  It’s just living with brazen integrity for the sake of living that way and nothing more. That’s success.

 

An Adjustment

 

Our culture ties success to achievement as defined as worthy and worthwhile in and by our culture.  Yet, real success is a life well lived regardless of the achievements or lack thereof that might be a part of that kind of living.  Live right.  Live well. Live with integrity.  Be guided by a strong morality.  Be a stand-up person in a world that’s too often standing-down. That’s success.  That’s worth living for and dying in.  Re-define success for yourself and live it.

 

Hope Deferred

Hope is often deferred.  Today we see hope not only as deferred, but often as vanishing.  We had hope in a career, or in a marriage, or in a friendship, or in some dream that we had dreamt for years.  We had hope that certain promises would make the world better, or change the course of a life, a family, a community, or a nation.  We had hope that tomorrow would be better and that yesterday would be forgotten.  We had hope that our kids would grow up healthy, that the medical issues would be resolves, or the debt would be overcome.  But too often, hope is deferred.  Yet, hope in God is never deferred because God is hope.  

Digging Our Own Holes - Getting Rid of the Shovels

We dig holes.  Lots of them.  With all kinds of shovels.  But the interesting thing is that we dig most of these holes without even recognizing that we’re digging holes right in the middle of digging them.  We dig a lot of holes and we have all kinds of shovels to dig them with.  We dig these holes through the decisions that we make, or the people that we tend to spend our time with, or the activities that we engage in, or the lifestyle choices that we’ve made, or the way that we spend our money, or the belief systems that we adhere to, or the habits that we develop, or the choices that we make to advance our careers, or the people that we marry and the people that we don’t.  We dig all kinds of holes with all kinds of shovels.

And maybe what we should do with our lives is stop digging holes.  And maybe we should stop all the digging by being thoughtful about what we’re doing.  Maybe we should stop the digging by refusing to be reactive.  By rejecting greedy impulses and refusing to get caught up in those impulses.  By starting to ask who we’re listening to and why.  Maybe we need to stop digging holes by asking where our ethics went, or who we’re hanging around with, or what habits we need to seriously consider getting rid of, or what principles we’ve left behind us that maybe we need to put in front of us, or the incessant denial that we live in and all of the rationalizes that we create to justify that denial.  Maybe we need to stop all the digging.

A New Life - Starting Again

Ever feel dead?  I mean the kind of dead where life’s lost its vitality, its meaning and every bit of its luster?  The kind of dead that leaves you feeling entirely numb and completely hopeless all at the same time; being stranded in this limp kind of limbo where you’re alive but you don’t feel like it at all?  Ever feel like there’s absolutely no purpose, no direction from here to someplace other than here, no value whatsoever, no redeeming quality anywhere, and no ladder to get you out of the bottomless hole you’re in?  Ever feel dead?

Here’s a curious bit of information that’s quite striking.  Archaeological excavations unearthed wheat seeds in pyramids dating back to 2500 B.C.  That makes these ancient seeds somewhere around 4500 years old, give or take a century.  In order to determine the types of grains used in the ancient world, archeologists planted them to see what would happen.  They grew!  Somehow, the spark of life hung in there for four and a half millennia.  What should have been long dead was very much alive.  What should have been snuffed out was not.  What should have been entirely hopeless wasn’t.  Think about it. 

It’s that time of year when things become new.  Spring and Easter are reminders of that which was terribly dead being made impossibly alive.  There’s something of a restorative quality about this time of year, where something whispers wild rumors of new beginnings arising from the seemingly dead seeds in our lives.  There’s something almost cruel about it all, as if there might be some sort of truth about a new life actually being possible.  Maybe it is true. 

Starting Over

How many times have we wished that we could just start over?  Would it be better to be dead and start over all new and fresh?  Sometimes it seems that it would be a whole lot easier to simply wipe the slate clean of whatever life has been.  There’s nothing like a fresh start, a clean break, a new day, a mulligan or a do over. 

However, life doesn’t grant us those options.  History is history.  It’s carved in granite in some sort of indelible script on the pavers that mark the road of our lives.  We can heal from it, learn from it, grow because of it, forgive what we did to others and forgive what was done to us.  We can let it haunt us, dog us, diminish us and destroy us if we let it, but we can’t change it.  It’s resource or demon.  It’s something that can be an asset or liability; a gift that blesses us or ghost that haunts us depending on how we use it, but it’s there for good. 

So, we’re stuck with our pasts.  Is life then about starting again, or is it about taking the resources of our past and using them to start over again?  Do we really want a fresh start, beginning with nothing in an attempt to build something?  Or would we be wiser to take whatever we have, whether it‘s perfect or painful and start from there?  Would it be wiser, possibly much wiser to plant that which seems dead and see what happens?

Starting Over is Not Starting Fresh

Starting over is an acceptance of a past we can’t change, an unrelenting conviction that the future can be different, and the stubborn wisdom to use the past to make the future what the past was not.  New starts are best built on the difficulties, failures and pain of the past.  It’s not about wiping the slate clean.  It’s about diligently studying what’s written there, learning from it, discerning its messages, drawing from it and applying what’s there.  Life from death in a resurrecting cycle where what kills us is turned in on itself to build us. 

Starting over is taking what life has dealt us and learning to see it as a resource when all we see is ruin.  In the oddity or maybe the miracle of life, the roots of something new frequently lie in the decaying husks of something old.  We just don’t see it that way.  We discard the old because we assume old equates with dead and useless.  Nothing could be further from the truth.

Starting Over by Believing that You Can

The seed in you is not dead.  Sometimes we don’t start over because all seems dead anyway.  There’s no life left so what’s the sense.  It’s all lain barren for so long that nothing could possibly hold any spark of life.  Whatever’s in us seems parched, dusty and long ago abandoned to the sands of time and hands of fate.  Life however is teeming with vitality and is likewise terribly tenacious; holding on against impossible odds in impossible situations over impossible lengths of time.  There are seeds within us that seem long dead that are in reality very much alive.  New beginnings lay in dead husks.

Starting Over by Looking Back

So what are the lessons back there that lay strewn among the ashes and carnage?  We would rather not pick through that stuff if we had our druthers.  It’s ugly.  It’s often painful.  And sometimes there’s a stench back there that reeks of abuse, abandonment, betrayal and loss.  So we’ve buried it . . . a long time ago.  Why unearth it?  We unearth it because seeds for growth are sown in fields of pain.  What seems dead is very often alive.

Start Over by Reinvesting Your Life

Try again.  Give life another shot.  Do it differently maybe, but go at it again.  Believe that things in life spend infinitely more energy trying to live than working to die.  Life is about living.  Look around you as spring moves across the landscape.  Life fights back.  It’s designed to overcome.  It’s intentional about living with intention.  It takes seeds that seem dead and from them, life brings forth life.  How about you?  Ever feel dead?  How about believing in a new day, giving life another shot and watching what happens.  The seeds are ready.  

 

When We Don't Care Anymore

Too often we don’t care, or that’s what we tell ourselves.  We work really hard not to care because we’ve figured out that caring is just too risky, in whatever way it happens to be too risky for us.  We get the idea in our head that ‘not’ caring is just easier, because we don’t care.  Or it’s safer, because we don’t care.  We’re not in a position to get hurt, because we don’t care.  If things don’t go our way it doesn’t matter, because we don’t care.  If something or someone fails us, there’s no loss to us because we don’t care.  And this whole mindset of not caring is not about not caring at all.  It’s about protecting ourselves from the pain that we fear we’ll experience if we do care.

And in all that retreating, maybe there’s a stance that we should have taken, or some action that we should have engaged in, or some decision that we should have stood in opposition to or in support of.  But we don’t.  We don’t.  Instead, we retreat.  And we retreat because we’ve worked real hard to convince ourselves that we don’t care, and we’ve done that so that we won’t get hurt.  And therefore, the battle that maybe should have been ours, or the battle that we should have contributed to, or the battle that was critical for us or someone else is fought without us being in it.  Or worse yet, maybe it never got fought at all because we didn’t show up to fight it.  And the loss that we incur, however we incurred it, is likely to cause a level of pain far, far greater than the pain that we were working to avoid feeling in the first place. 

And in the end, there’s a good chance that we’ll end up caring that we didn’t care.  And because we end up caring that we didn’t care, we’ll create a battle in the last place that we ever want to fight one…and that’s within ourselves.

An Intimate Collision

How have we come to the point where the message of the Gospel is largely considered irrelevant in 21^st century America?  How is it that God is outmoded, outdated, antiquated, and has nothing of value to say to us as we live out our lives today?  How is it that the God Who created ‘all of this’ has been left behind by the very thing that He created?  How have we come to this point?

But maybe the question is not “how,” but “why.”  Why have we come to this point?  Why have we come to visualize God as some ancient artifact that might have worked for less educated people living out their lives in some primitive society hundreds, if not thousands of years ago?  Why have we relegated Him to a period of time long gone, and in doing so completely failed to recognize that times might change, but people don’t?  Why have we come to see God as entirely outmoded in light of our progressive philosophies, or our ever-shifting ethics, or our new morality?

God is most relevant thing in existence.  His principles apply to our world today probably more than any time in human history.  He alone holds the truths, the ideals, the values, and the principles that can assist us in navigating the profound challenges of our times and our lives.  The principles handed down to us in the Bible are entirely sound, uncompromisingly relevant, timely in ways that are mind-boggling, and sufficiently powerful to assist us in navigating the descending darkness of the times that we live in.  God and His principles are the most relevant thing that I can think of.

Change - The Seasons of Life

Life is never static, therefore it's always changing.  Life never settles into some place where it's going to ride out its time for all of time.  Life is always building, and in the building sometimes it adds things and at other times it takes them away.  There are times where advances move us forward, but where reversals also move us forward despite our frequent inability to understand that reality.  Sometimes life changes in ways we like, and at other times it changes in ways that are less than favorable.

Whatever the case might be, life changes and we are part of life.  Therefore, we are both built for and maximized by change.  As part of that journey, we need to focus on the unseen opportunities in change rather than fight it out of our fear of it.  We need to see something closing as something else opening.  We need to let the past be the preparation for the future, not the place that is our future.  The season is moving forward, and if we move with it we will move to places both great and glorious.

Pain to Paralysis - Coming Apart at the Seams

There’s pain, and then there’s intensely deep pain.  We all have pain.  We all have the pain of failed experiences,sordid disappointments, wasted opportunities and wasted investments that we thought were opportunities.  There’s the pain of not being where we imagined being, of being forced to embrace dreams as more fantasy than substance, of friends in flight and fortitude forgotten.  There’s the pain of growing up and growing jaded, a world devolving despite relentless efforts to reverse it all, of diminished confidence in our fellowman and a diminished confidence when the fellowman is us.

Then there the ‘core of your soul ’kind of pain that’s entirely different.  It’s the kind of pain that’s rarely sharp but indisputably debilitating.  It's profoundly aching to a paralyzing numbness with a venomous bite that’s emotionally heart-stopping.  It’s exceedingly more than painful, it kills; not a straight-up obvious kind of death, but more the killing of the soul that leaves us alive while simultaneously dead.  It’s a pain that flaunts healing, that defies a cure and that leaves a forever ‘limp’ in our souls.  How do we deal with that kind of pain?  How do we survive it?  Join us for a few thoughts that might help you begin the process of moving past that kind of pain.  

Playing With the Dark - Careless in the Shadows

 

Halloween is one of those things that captivates many people.  It’s been granted status as a holiday and because it has, what it is and what it symbolizes has been granted some sort of legitimacy.  Halloween and what it embodies has been given some stamp of approval because we’ve stamped it onto the calendar.  And so we feel we’ve been granted some element of permission to cross some lines and play with darkness because we’ve got this holiday on the calendar that says we can. 

As with anything else, we need to think about what we’re doing when we’re deciding to cross a line, whatever that line might be.  What is our reason?  What is our purpose?  If we’re out to raise our lives to the next level or advance others, our reasons likely have legitimacy.  But if we’re crossing the line just to say we’ve crossed the line, or we’re doing so out of some captivation with whatever it is that’s captured our fancy, or dabble in something that we feel that’s forbidden, then we’re likely to become captive to those very things and ultimately consumed by them.  Therefore, we'd be wise to consider what we're playing with and how it's going to end up playing us.

Discouragement - Courage, Determination and Persistence

Discouragement.  It's no stranger to any of us.  Whether it's from a goal that we can't reach, a marriage that we can't make work, personal issues that we can't solve, or friendships that we can't mend...we all become discouraged.  Sometimes our discouragement is based on the size of the challenge that we face or the fact that the issue keeps raising its ugly head regardless of our many attempts to bury it forever.  Sometimes it's our own fatigue or the exhaustion that we feel in all of our failed attempts to finally get to where we want to go.

Discouragement can be completely debilitating.  It can cause us to believe that there's no hope, no solution, no way out or no way in.  Yet, because we're discouraged does not mean that the battle is lost.  It simply means that we might have to change our approach, alter our tactics, determine if we're fighting the right battle in the right way, and reengage in a better way.  In essence, we've got to develop courage, determination and persistence.  Because if we can develop and strengthen these traits and then utilize them with wisdom, we've got a good shot at beating what's been beating us.    

Historical Revisionism

History is the story of millions who lived out lives that are now held in this great vault called 'history.'  It is their legacy.  It is the declaration of the fact that they lived and it is a careful summation of what they did with their lives.  History is also the thing that instructs millions of us today.  It is the thing that shows us how to avoid the devastation experienced by those who went before us and how to repeat the successes that were theirs as well.  As such, history is powerful, history is immense, and history is sacred.

Yet, if it does not align with our agenda or if it opposes it altogether, we rewrite it.  We take unwarranted liberties with this precious thing that speaks to the lives that have gone before us and we alter it.  We perpetrate the abuses as greedy people who demand that history fall in line or history will fall to the editing pencil of our agendas.  Such abuses are certain to find us out if we don't snuff them out.

 

  

The Sacrifice of Truth for the Support of Our Agenda

How important is the truth?  How critical is it to not only a healthy existence, but any existence at all?  Is the truth negotiable or is the truth absolute?  Is there such a thing as truth, or is the concept of truth the figment of imaginations that needed something steady and sturdy to get them through life?

We can ask many questions about the truth and we can pick the concept apart quiet handily.  But history shows that the abandonment of truth creates space for the shifting contrivances of men.  And those are a sure path to a terrible destruction.  Truth is imperative.  Yet, we will redefine the truth, reshape the truth, spin the truth, or abandon it altogether if it does not support whatever our agenda might be.  If an agenda requires the modification or the elimination of the truth, that agenda is certain to destroy us at the very same time that we are building it.

Facts, Logic and Truth - The Assumption

We assume way too much.  In our culture today, there are many who assume that their agenda or point-of-view is correct.  Sometimes their agendas or points-of-view go beyond being correct to being the single, solitary view, leaving no room for other opinions or perspectives.  Many of these agendas are not necessarily based in facts, logic or truth, although it is claimed that they are.  Often they are based on something less solid and less than completely enduring.  Those that hold these various agendas or views often feel that they're solidly based in facts, logic and truth, but such a perspective is often questionable.

It seems that we need to stop and think a bit.  We need to back away from what often appears to be blind adherence to whatever agenda is trending or whatever view grants us whatever permission we wish to be granted.  We need to become thoughtful instead of thoughtless.  We need to ask the larger questions, probe a bit deeper, and face the truth regarding what we're standing for or what we're standing on.  And if we do that, maybe we can begin to embrace the truth embodied in this quote:

"It is my prayer that we would stop for a moment, turn off the voices that clamor for our allegiance, put aside the incessant rant of political agendas, and sit with ourselves for just a moment. And in the quiet of that moment, listen to your heart. For what you will hear is not all that far removed from the people that the ‘voices’ and ‘agendas’ claim to be your enemies."

 

Taking the Time to be Honest About the Real Issues

We get caught up in the fervor and energy of some cause to the degree that the fervor and energy keeps us from determining what the real 'cause' of the cause is.  We seldom sit back and ask what is really happening and what this is really all about.  We believe that we are informed.  We sense that we have an understanding for that which we've found ourselves caught up in.  We say that we can defend the rationale of the cause and justify its platform.  But can we?

We are not a thoughtful people.  We are too often a rash people.  We jump to conclusions.  We believe something if it sounds appealing enough to believe.  If the cause is championed by someone of status or fame, we conclude that the cause must be worthwhile.  We fall for the hype, we consume the propaganda, and we run pell-mell into something that eventually runs over us.  We need to become thoughtful people.  For if we don't, we will end up in places that we never thought we would be.

Mining Memories - The Tool of Memory

So, what’s up with memories?  We all have hoards of them, apparently endless reams of them that run a seemingly impossible gamut.  Our memories encompass a boundless array of events.  They’re expansive enough to fully embody the entire breadth of our emotions.  They can be crystal clear and irreparably clean in their recollections.  They can likewise be fuzzy, misty-like and somewhat fluid; creating dramatic and moving renderings of our past from the abstract, to the surreal, to something quite conventional.  Memories preserve what would otherwise be lost and they create a means by which to redeem ourselves through the lessons learned and adjustments made because we can recall it all enough to learn. 

Are memories just sights and sounds and moments and experiences filed somewhere in some methodical filing cabinet located in the gray fissures of our brains?  Are memories about some internal hard drive that collects all this stuff for retrieval at some critical or possibly opportune time?  Clearly, memories have a vitally important place in our lives, otherwise why would we have them in such wonderful and woeful abundance?  The ability that we have to store information and experiences and feelings serves a multitude of indispensible purposes.  In fact, it’s likely that we simply couldn’t live without the mind’s ability to remember and to recall.  If we could, we would certainly be so much the poorer.

So it would appear that memories and the ability to recall things would appear to be incredibly, possibly indescribably important.  The question is do we maximize this ability?  Do we utilize this marvelous faculty as fully and as completely as we could or should?  Have we ever even considered the magnitude of this seemingly fathomless resource or do we embrace it as little more than a tool to reminisce, or a curse that causes us to remember that which we’d much prefer to forget?  Does memory become just the stuff of curious trivia or abundant fodder for colorful conversation?  Or is it possible that this ability is far more valuable and more indescribably powerful than we even begin to realize.  It’s possible that we don’t even come close to understanding what this amazing resource can do.  Have we then forfeited a quite phenomenal resource? Because we do, we leave it languishing as some sort of all too common process that readily generates trivia and information, but is lacking for life-altering substance.

Memory Feeds Us

Amy Tan wrote, “Memory feeds imagination.”  Memory is the vast and endless storehouse that ceaselessly feeds the richest parts of our deepest selves.  It’s the copiously rich and prolific food-stuff from which the marvel of our core humanity is luxuriantly nurtured.  Memory refuses to grant us permission to live solely in the one-dimensional realm of the present.  Instead, it affords us the opportunity to live in the flourish of the present while simultaneously sipping fully on the many variant flavors of the past.  Memory can seamlessly draw from both the past and the present, feeding more than sufficient creativity to live with flourish in the present and robustly create an entirely innovative future.    

Memory Preserves

Memory is that thing that will not allow life to listlessly pass by and be forever lost in the passing-by.  Life comes by once and if it were not somehow captured in the passing we would hold it only for the moment that we have it, and then it would be gone.  We would be creatures of the moment only and we would be unable to take every moment and use those moments to build on every other moment.  Memory allows for the amassing of a prolific array of building blocks rather than living with the flatness of holding onto the building block of the moment and having to forfeit it for the building block of the next moment and then the moment after that.  Memory preserves.

Memory Maximizes the Storehouse of the Mind

The human mind is incomprehensibly vast.  Such is the extent of the mind that we’re not even remotely capable of understanding what it can do.  The only limitation that the mind has is the amount of information and experiences that’s put into it, not the capacity to store it.  If we leave the mind empty, if we’re unable to seize each moment and store those moments in the mind’s vast storehouse for retrieval, the immense size of our minds simply wouldn’t matter.  Why foolishly squander the resource of the mind by leaving its vast enclaves empty and barren?  Why would we let empty space define us?

Memories Build on Themselves

Tyron Edwards wrote, ““Contemplation is to knowledge what digestion is to food - the way to get life out of it.”  If we simply see memories as memories, as nice or not so nice places to walk around and reminisce we won’t mine the riches in them to enhance the riches in them.  We walk through our memories for a whole lot of reasons, but typically not to submerge ourselves in them in order to let them build upon themselves.  Typically our trip into them is much more something similar to a casual jaunt and a whole lot more superficial than serious; something like a stroll rather than an expedition, or a walk in the park verses parking ourselves in them.  We miss the fact that memories build upon themselves in a prolific flowering that makes the sum total of the memories greater than their individual parts.  Memories expand in their encounters with other memories.

Memories Mark History

Memories are the files that hold our histories.  Histories grant us an undeniable and powerfully sustaining sense of purpose as they recite our paths.  In reciting our paths we develop a sense that our lives were not the woven from the fabric of randomness, but that there is a rational progression that suggests something of meaning and intent.  Memories map out a path taken that permits us to see a rhyme and reason to what appeared to be randomness.  They allow us to see our lives in retrospect and in doing so to identify footprints that, from the distance afforded by memory, are anything but wandering.  It’s here that we come to understand that our apparently meaningless and misdirected lives have something a whole lot more purposeful to them.  In such a telling discovery, we can see that our lives had a rationale that suggests undeniable purpose.

Remembering Memories

You might be well advised to wade into the vast seas of your memories.  Such a journey is potentially rich, certainly richer than meandering, or more likely, running away from them.

Communication - Some Bold Fundamentals

Communication is critical to our existence.  Without it, we are isolated entities functioning without the ability to connect to anyone or anything around us.  Without communication we lose relationships, we can't create community, and any ability to cooperate in building out a life and a larger culture simply does not exist.  Yet, despite the incredible importance of communication, we don't focus on doing it well.  Much of our communication is rather sloppy, slip-shod and less than thoughtful.  With others often communicating in a similar fashion, our interactions deteriorate to the point that relationships are simply not possible, or they remain distant, or they become damaged beyond restoration.  This brief video outlines several basic yet powerful communication skills that will begin the process of enhancing your communication.   

Cleaning Up Our Lives - Liberated Living

We live unnecessarily restricted lives.  And in living those lives, we slowly suffocate in the things we have created and surrounded ourselves with.  Living this way, we tend to place blame on circumstance, or we surrender to some misplaced feeling that life is just this way.  We feel we don't have any power to change things and that our lives will simply move on in whatever way the winds of chance and culture blow.  This brief podcasts suggests that much of the constraints and difficulties that we live with are a product of our own choices.  It likewise highlights way to begin to change these in order to liberate the life we live. 

Assumptions - Agendas and Dangers

We all know what they say about "assuming."  But assuming something is not just a random guess or a proverbial "shot in the dark."  Rather, there are often agendas or biases that drive our assumptions.  Assumptions are often far more than simple or naive guesses.  Many times they are our attempts to push an agenda, or drive a situation in the direction we wish it to go.  Often assumptions are really more the manner in which we broadcast a bias or manipulate a situation to the end that we desire.  We can assume something to be something, so that in the assuming we actually make it what we want it to be.  While subtle, such behaviors can be terribly destructive.  This brief podcast outlines this interesting and thought-provoking dynamic so that we might have an enhanced awareness of it in our own lives, as well as the lives of others. 

Loneliness - Communication that Starves Relationships

Life is a journey, and it’s not a solo one.  But far more than that, along the journey and deep within the journey we find richness in relationships; those who know us intimately in a manner that can obliterate the terrifying sense of aloneness and wipe out crippling sense of meaninglessness.  There’s an indefinable camaraderie in relational intimacy that lends a priceless and terribly rare sense of meaning to the journey, while infusing the journey with an often surprisingly exuberant strength as well.  We need those who can share in the muddy rigors and turbulent turmoil of our journey in a manner that exponentially expands the meaning and the joy of the journey in ways we hadn’t even thought of at the outset of the journey. To journey alone is to journey to possible success.  But to journey alone is to journey to success that is empty, pitifully vacant, likely isolating and therefore void of the sense of success despite the success itself. 

Life is a journey, and it’s not a solo one.  It’s designed for intimacy.  So what’s real intimacy?  Intimacy is that soul-mate kind of connection that has nothing to do with physical intimacy, but everything to do with the complexity of two human beings finding a fundamental interweaving of their corporate humanity that together renders them more than the sum of whomever or whatever they are apart.  It’s the realization that I’m alone in this life as single human being whose experience is uniquely mine.  Yet, I am alone in a world that affords me the opportunity of intimacy where I can take the unique experience that is mine and mine alone, and I can take the unique person that I am and connect all of that with another human being that results in the loss of none of that uniqueness whatsoever, and the gain of adding the life of another to mine, and mine to them. 

Relationships enrich.  They are a gift, an opportunity, the creation of a wildly imaginative God who wanted us to have everything that we are and enjoy the “everything” of another human being with the ability to have each enriched beyond measure and never diminished beyond question.  Relationships expand us.  But we can’t have relationships if we can’t communicate.  If you take communication out of relationships, you have no relationship. Communication is essential, yet we’re losing the very ability to communicate.

 

Loneliness and Full In-Boxes

Loneliness is about relationships, or more fundamentally, the absence of relationships.  The word “relationship” has become terribly ill-defined,or more specifically under-defined in a culture that’s consistently moving in wildly random directions at speeds that we can’t even begin to define, other than whatever speed it is it’s not fast enough.

Because of the speed that we’re relentlessly moving at, we communicate just enough to fill the informational void, get the data, plug it in, or meet some brief connective need of the moment so that we can move on to the next moment to make room for the moment that comes after that.  George Bernard Shaw wrote, “The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.”  The acquisition of data and the obtaining of information convey something, but that’s not communication.  It does however leave us with the abysmal illusion that communication took place, yet its illusion only.  We’re left with a bunch of data,but an equally large sense of aloneness.      

All the while we’re attempting to connect,build relationships and maintain relationships in the snippets, sound-bites and the precariously thin threads of texting, posting on walls, blogging, connecting with our “tweets,” IM’ing, being “linked-in” and so forth.  We have electronic communication that fires messages at the speed of light to devices half a world away or the cell  phones hanging on our hips.  

Sure, these modes of communication provide for the transmission of data. But they are not sturdy enough, sufficiently deep enough, or possess the essence of the human touch adequately enough to connect with the heart and soul of another human being.  Certainly, these types of communication have their place. But they fall terribly short and are woefully inadequate in connecting the beating heart and tender spirit of one human being to another.  They are crudely incapable of weaving together the fabric of two complex souls so that they can fully share in the human journey in some sort of unified partnership. 

Relationships are about the degree of connectivity that we have with others.  Degree implies depth; that kind of connection that’s calibrated by ever-deepening degrees of intimacy that bonds us in a cement-like fashion with another.  Sure, we can have a boatload of acquaintances and we can be social butterflies that flit and flirt around a never-ending array of people in some sort of completely shallow, flirtatious dance.  We can play the social games and do the various gatherings and have everyone think that we’re so wonderful and so clever and so quick and so charming and so brilliant. But that’s an orchestrated show designed to impress.  In the end everyone walks away entertained and having had a rollicking good time, but with nothing other than a perpetuated sense of emptiness, wondering are there any real people out there?  What that kind of thing is not is an honest interaction stripped bare by vulnerability whose sole intent is to engender nothing but intimacy with another human being who feels as empty and lonely as we do.    

 

Communication as Critical

Communication is bridge by which two lives intersect.  It’s a communion of souls, a bathing in the heart of another, a melding of two people into one while each individual stays uniquely themselves.  This is not about data transmission or sharp sound-bites.  It’s not about how many gigabytes we’ve used or what we used them for. Communication is the use of words, touch, body language, eye contact,actions, behaviors and so much more that are the stuff of the human soul and not transmittable by any electronic device. 

Phyllis McGinley wrote, “Sticks and stones are hard on bones, aimed with angry art, words can sting like anything,but silence breaks the heart.”  We can say a lot of things and make a lot of noise, but how many times is what we’re saying really nothing more than silence? How many times do we think we’re communicating and all we’re doing is conveying information?  Your relationship will not survive on the conveyance of information, despite how adept you might be at doing it.  Your relationship can only survive on communication.  So you might be well-advised to ask if you’re conveying information and the relational silence that creates, or you’re communicating. There’s a world of difference.  

Loneliness - Agendas That Starve Relationships

We live our lives based on agendas.  Most of our agendas are pretty subdued so that we don’t often recognize them or really comprehend exactly how they affect our behaviors and our choices.  On the other hand, some of our agendas are glaring, screaming into our lives in a manner that every action and choice is methodically dictated by them. 

Agendas have a methodical way of commandeering our thinking.  They can create within us an ever-increasing sense that if we don’t adhere to them we’re going to be in big trouble.  While agendas may innocently start out as goals or frameworks that are designed to productively channel various aspects of our lives, they often grow into monolithic proportions.  Sometimes our agendas become tyrannical gods, legalistic rules, incessantly demanding expectations or rock-hard boundaries that are held as imperative. We then become our agendas and we subsequently project our agendas into everything we touch. 

Because of the intimacy and vulnerability of relationships, agendas tend to rear their ugly heads with quite a bit of force.  Most relationships don’t start out that way, but as they evolve so does the implementation and integration of our agendas.  In time, our agendas become the things that define the relationship rather than the people in the relationship defining the relationship. There is a dictatorial sense to it all; a suffocating and strangling kind of orientation where people are made to fit an agenda.  The relationship itself is thoroughly stifled and ends up pooling in the rank waters of relational stagnation.  In time, the relationship can become intolerable and is therefore vacated. 

There are a number of agendas that we forcefully cram into relationships, or cram relationships in to.  If there’s one thing that’s for certain,certain agendas are certain to kill a relationship.  In doing an agenda inventory, we may wish to look for some of these:  

                                                                                              

The Agenda of Power and Leverage

Typically we build relationships to build out our goals.  Relationships have often become little more than a resource with the ultimate objective of the relationship to achieve whatever goal we have in mind.  Relationships are often seen as a tool, some sort of asset, something that gives us power or leverage.  Sometimes we see it as the thing that supplies us strength or motivation when we’re expended, or that resource undergirds us when our energies flag and our fears flare.  It’s that thing that we can fall back on when we need a boost, or turn to when our emotional legs buckle, or something that lends some degree of accountability that causes us to “buck up” when we burning out.  Whatever we use it for and wherever it fits, it becomes something of a resource rather than relationship. 

To view a relationship as something to be used is to insure its death.  When a relationship dies, a bit of us dies with it. In that sense, using a relationship for our advantage is clearly using it for our disadvantage, not to mention that the other person doesn’t fare all that well either.  Relationships need to be fed and nurtured with ample space to allow them to flourish.  Power and leverage too often becomes punitive and lethal.  

 

The Agenda of “Because We’re Supposed To”

Of course we’re supposed to have friends.  And because we’re supposed to have them we’d better go out and round up a few.  After all, we wouldn’t want to look like social misfits, or undesirables, or people who live out on the fringe of society and have people look at us kind of sideways.  So we have to claim knowledge of somebody, or that we hung out with so and so, or that we’ve have either enough invitations or maybe more than enough.  Sometimes relationships are what we’re supposed to have in order to look the part, and so we go out and we collect them.  It’s something like playing “dress up” where we put on people like some kind of finery and strut about with an air of importance and social finesse.  It’s all about the “look at me” scenario,“ain’t I something?” 

People are not clothing nor are they some sort of fashion accessory.  They’re not points to be counted as we tally up our social scoreboard.  They’re not steps on some sort of social ladder, nor are they an aphrodisiac for our insecurities.  This agenda kills relationships.

 

The Agenda of Working Out My Issues

We all have issues.  Sometimes we view relationships as the place where we can work out our issues. There’s some sort of belief that the person we’re in the relationship with will have some sort of ability to help us navigate our issues.  It could be that they’re close to us, that we see them as committed to us, that we can be vulnerable with them in ways we can’t with others, or that relationships are all about helping everyone become the best that they can be.  Relationships are sometimes seen as having this emotionally magical thing going on that’s got all the mystical ingredients in it.  All we’ve got to do is lightly sprinkle this relational fairy dust on us long enough and abracadabra, we’re good.  Whatever our mindset might be, relationships are sometimes seen as the place to heal of our issues.  While healing can certainly take place, inherently a relationship does not possess everything that we need to heal everything in our lives.

 

The Agenda of Revenge

Sometimes we’re in a relationship to get back at someone else.  The relationship that we’re in is about revenge, about throwing something in someone’s face that hurt us previously.  At times the relationship we’re engaged in has little or nothing to do with the person that we’re in the relationship with.  The relationship itself is in actuality targeting someone entirely outside the relationship.  It’s about retribution fora perceived hurt that was inflicted or a harm done.  Sometimes it’s purely about manipulation as we attempt to press our agendas with someone else through the relationship that we’re in.  Other times it’s our way to break with another person or an entire social grouping by aligning ourselves with somebody who’s completely removed from them.  Revenge wounds everybody, every time.

 

What’s Your Agenda?

Maybe you never thought about your agendas.  They become such a natural part of our thinking we don’t even see them as agendas anymore.  But they’re agendas and they’ll have the toxic impact that so many agendas have in relationships.  Think about yours.  Think about their legitimacy.  Think about the agenda of your agendas.  Think about where they come from.  And most importantly, ask if you really want to keep them.

Reality - The Extent of Your Reach

Albert Einstein said that “  an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.”  Yet, we see reality as anything but illusion.  Wikipedia states that in philosophy, “reality” is defined as “the state of things as they actually exist, rather than as they may appear or might be imagined.”  When we throw around the word “reality,” we assume it to mean all that’s really real. We see “reality” as something where all the fake and fraudulent has been entirely stripped away leaving nothing but that which is true and genuine. The word “reality” suggests something that’s completely grounded, that’s entirely true and that’s totally accurate.  We sense it as something that’s solidly rock bottom and unarguably the end of the story.  “Reality” for most of us is what life was like before we added all the junk to it that we’ve added.  It’s the uncontaminated raw essence of existence.  In other words, it’s the untainted, untouched and unalterable truth.

 

Shopping for Our Realities

Yet, out of our indomitable need to be masters of our own fates and the captains of our own ships, we prefer to shape our own realities.  It’s odd that we think we have the ability to wield power that we really don’t possess at all.  We don’t see ourselves as wonderfully privileged to be a part of this amazing journey that’s been laid out before us.  Rather, we see ourselves as being people who have the inalienable right and uncontested license to design,fashion and form this journey from the ground up.  We claim life solely as our private enterprise and we cast it entirely in our design.  Indeed, we have a strange way of taking liberty with things that we really can’t take liberty with.  We can be an arrogant bunch at times,thinking we have the ability or the right to manage things that we simply can’t.  

In some respects it might be likened to some sort of god-complex or maybe the classic short-man syndrome.  Whatever it is, we think we’re privileged enough or powerful enough to control that which we can’t.  One of the realities of humanity is our sense that our right to independence extends to our right to craft our lives in whatever manner we choose to craft them. That then creates a mentality that a pre-existent reality which is universal in nature and scope is an entirely unfair and unjust hindrance.  The realities that we create tell us that a universal reality can’t be a reality because of the manner in which it impedes us.  Therefore, if we massage our minds enough to believe that a universal reality does not exist we must create our own reality.   

It’s no news to anyone that there are many realities out there for the choosing. That’s what tends to make all of this a bit confusing.  However, it does afford us the opportunity to embrace the reality of our choosing.  And if there’s not one out there that really appeals to us, we can go right ahead and custom or semi-custom design our own.

 

Our Own Custom Designs

Our “reality” is often what we’ve constructed.  We build out our lives and we fashion our existence, sometimes carrying those tasks out in very meticulous ways, and at other times doing so in rather abrupt and less than thoughtful ways.   Sometimes we create our realities based on well laid out plans, and at other times we piece-meal things as we fly by the proverbial “seat of our pants.”  Oftentimes we exercise great care because we care, and at other times we’re careless because we could care less.  However and in whatever way we do it, what we construct stands before us looking strikingly real and credibly genuine at times.  We can perform a down-right convincing job of rigorously constructing an intellectual,or emotional, or spiritual, or relational behemoth that looks breathtakingly lifelike.  The pressing question becomes, does the “reality”we’ve created reflect the larger realities around us?  And in creating our own “reality,” have we forfeited “reality?” 

 

Our Semi-Custom Designs

The world around us seems like a grandly expansive buffet chock full of cheap imitations.  It’s interesting that what we create is always an imitation of something else.  Whether in whole or in part, the things that we fashion in life always borrow from something else.  That suggests that there must be something original, some creative point of departure that emerged from nothing but itself.  Everything after that is, to one degree or another, a copy. 

So we shop this massive buffet of cheap imitations and we pick a bit of this and a bit of that.  Sometimes we take things in their entirety,or we whack off or carve out the parts that appeal to us.  Whatever it is that we walk out with we craft it into our realities.  Therefore, our realities are borrowed and integrated into some sort of semi-custom design.  What we borrow is what appeals.  So our intent is to create a reality that’s appealing, that’s nice, and that’s comfy and cozy.  Our semi-custom realities can be custom made to fit our personal agendas, our biases, our prejudices, our fears, and our emotional baggage.  They can be fashioned to lend credence to our views, give us permission to avoid our pain, allow us to live in blissful ignorance, and rubber stamp whatever we want rubber stamped.

 

Borrowing

Then there’s the ability to just borrow our “reality” wholesale.  It’s the “I’ll take one of those” mentalities where we simply grab whatever “reality” is closest or whatever “reality” is the easiest and run with it.  In doing this we forfeit any ability to engage life as unique creations and become whatever someone else has designed.  Sometimes we do this out of a compelling argument that convinces us that someone’s design of “reality” is the real deal.  Whatever the motivation, we borrow a “reality” and we park ourselves in it and on it.  Typically we never really question or scrutinize the “reality” of the “reality” simply because borrowing is a whole lot easier to do.  So we live in a borrowed world on borrowed time.

 

Real“Reality”

Anything that we assume to do will obviously be limited by our limitations which are pretty limited.  That means that if our “reality” is limited to what we create, we’ll end up living in a pretty tiny world that’s going to be thinly populated, pretty sparse, quite dreary and just plain flat.  On our own we cannot begin to hope to exercise a degree of intellectual acumen, or emotional depth, or spiritual magnitude that could rise to even touch the slightest hem of the realities of the world we live in.  We build our finite realities instead of exploring an unrestricted infinite reality.  We then spin little lives in dark caverns that we’ve come believe are filled with irrepressible light; and we languish. 

In reality, the question of “reality”has been bounced around throughout human history.  It would appear that a hallmark of “reality”is that we didn’t create it.  Second,“reality” is not the product of innovation or alteration.  Third, if something’s hard and demanding it’s probably closer to reality than the easy stuff. Fourth, embracing reality rather than shaping it or borrowing it is going to give us the richest and fullest life. And finally, reality is expansive enough to give us a life-long journey of endless horizons and ceaseless discovery. The “reality” is that you might want to really think about it.

The Untimely - When It All Happens When It Shouldn't

Someone once uttered the timeless saying that timing is everything. There’s something about things happening in a certain order in a certain time that makes it all fit in a certain way. We sense a natural and correct progression that, if followed, leads to success or happiness or fulfillment or whatever it is that we’re chasing.  The whole element of timing seems critical.  The more important something is, the greater the issue of timing. Timing can be so critical that at times we set out to minutely orchestrate the pieces and parts of whatever we’re doing so that everything is perfectly cinched and tightly in synch. 

Yet sometimes it all falls apart.  I mean it disintegrates; something like Murphy’s Law times three or four. Sometimes it’s not just a matter of something being a bit out of step,or not lining up quite right.  It’s not about tweaking something or nudging it back into whatever place it was supposed to be.  Sometimes the wheels fall off the thing, which then causes everything else to fall off as well.  We end up with the classic train wreck where we met an uphill train on a downhill grade. More than that however, there’s absolutely no rhyme or reason for the train wreck.  It simply didn’t need to be.  It was all way beyond any odds or all statistics.  Whatever happened, it was a cruelly extenuated string of dumb luck. 

Sometimes it just all falls apart . .. all of it.  We’re left standing dumbfounded, mired in the confusion of it all and running our minds down a thousand roads of the classic “what could have gone wrong” question.  Sure, we’ll likely find some things that weren’t too well thought out or strategies that were a bit ill-conceived.  We might unearth some rationales that now, in hindsight, aren’t quite as rational as we originally thought them to be.  We even might stumble over some misdirected motivations or less than ethical agendas that were part of the whole thing.  The way we pasted it all together may have not been entirely seamless and the stuff that we pasted together in the first place might have been less of a fit than we have originally thought.  We may have even chosen to force fit some stuff that in the end really didn’t mesh a whole lot.  Yeah, there are probably some quirks and a few flaws. 

Yet, there are times when these quirks and flaws and other dynamics really represent only a small portion of the whole.  We dig and scratch and scrape only to uncover a sparse handful of these dynamics.  There are times when the sum total of them is far too small and far too innocuous to really explain why the whole thing fell apart.  They don’t add up sufficiently to explain the mess that lays scattered, derelict and broken at our feet. 

In the end we’re left with bushels of questions that rot for lack of answers.  Things just didn’t line up.  There’s no sustaining or compelling rationale other than it didn’t happen when and how it should have happened.  If the timing had been good, it all would have all been good. But the timing was not and now everything lays wrecked and ravaged. 

Sometimes the losses are marginal.  At other times they’re catastrophic.  Sometimes we can just pickup our toys, brush them off, head on home and play another day.  Sometimes there’s nothing left to pick up other than the charred ash of incinerated dreams and the unidentifiable pieces of years’ worth of hope and sacrificial toil. Sometimes it’s no big deal, and at other times the whole thing is a deal-breaker.

 

How Does It Work?        

Maybe we should expand our thinking a bit.  Maybe we should ask the question “is loss sometimes the best thing that can happen?” That’s a bitter and biting pill to swallow, on top of the fact that it’s a completely unsavory to even entertain in the first place.  It suggests however that things in life don’t line up because maybe they’re not supposed to. Maybe what we were doing was in reality a whole lot more wrong than it was right.  Maybe it would have been a whole lot more damaging than it would have been constructive.  Maybe it would have been the thing that would have robbed us totally blind rather than enriching us beyond measure.  Maybe it would have become the monster rather than the malevolent benefactor.  Maybe the fact that wheels fell off of it and it derailed was one of the biggest blessings we’ve experienced in a very long time. 

At the beginning, when we’ve started to head off into most of our endeavors we don’t have the perspective of what this will look like on the other end. All we see is what we have in front of us, how it all goes together, and then based on that how we guess it will all come out in the wash.  We can take a shot at speculating outcomes and be pretty convinced that our conceptualization will indeed be what it will look like on the other side.  We can do the math and project the numbers and point to what it should all add up to.  We can play with our mental bell-curves and crunch the emotional numbers to calculate an outcome.  But sometimes things don’t add up according to our calculations, despite how tedious they might be.  Sometimes our best projections because our most haunting nightmares. 

We’re typically not open to this kind of thinking because we’re angry about the loss and we’re licking our wounds because we feel jipped.  We’re not in the mindset to think about the fact that maybe it blew up so that we wouldn’t.  All we tend to focus on is the feeling that we’ve been victimized, ripped off, short-changed and short-sheeted.  The reality is that sometimes we are.  But quite often this is life’s way of putting on the brakes.

 

Is It Untimely?

Are our circumstances untimely, or very timely?  Do our situations appear untimely only because we’re seeing what didn’t happen, but we refuse to see the things that are happening right in the middle of what didn’t happen?  Are we so myopic that we can’t see beyond the train wreck to the fact that the wreck stopped the train and that that might have been the very thing that compassionately saved us, or maybe graciously redirected us?  To our chagrin, the exact time and place when we think something shouldn’t have happened may very well bethe exact time and place when it absolutely should happened. 

Rose Kennedy said that “Life isn't a matter of milestones but of moments.” It’s not about what we achieve, but what we learn on the way to the achievement.  We glue our eyes to the goal and we ignore the journey on the way there.  And that journey will often involve our world’s falling apart despite heroic efforts to keep them together.  Yet, our world’s falling apart have within the event great lessons that we would be well advised to embrace.  Moments are not always nice, but they can be rich.  So, when your world falls apart in the untimeliness of living, look at the wreckage.  There’s something rich there for you.     

Love - What Is It?

What’s love?  That question is probably a topic to be debated.  We’ve got a million different definitions for this thing that we call “love.”  It seems that we’re in love with the idea of“love,” but we’re not all that caught up in the sacrifices that love will demand of us.  And so, we craft and we carve and we contort love to be something that we love, but something that we don’t love so much that it demands much of us. None of that is really love.  And so, what is love? 

It’s the stuff of endless novels, myths and legends. Entire movies and plays are driven from the first line to the last by this single theme.  We live for it, fight for it, plead for it, cheat for it and die for it. We even go so far as to fabricate cheap and limp imitations of love to at least get a small piece of something that looks like love.  But none of that is really love. 

We step into the quandary of the greeting card aisle and we’re faced with an endless variety of cards that extol love. We’ve got a whole holiday dedicated to it.  Our tombstones are cut with inscriptions that talk about how we loved or were loved.  We’re quick to say that we love certain foods or certain people or certain hobbies or certain colors.  Sometimes we speak the word“love” with a deep passion we don’t even understand.  Other times we throw it around to describe something we tend to like or feel good about. But what is it?

 

Love is Powerful

One thing’s for sure, love is powerful.  We all want it, or in reality we all need it. It’s inborn in us as some sort of fundamental human need that’s as important as water, food and oxygen.  You can’t grab it.  You can’t box it.  It doesn’t ship well and refrigeration doesn’t preserve it.  Love doesn’t allow you to control it or catch it or herd it.  We didn’t invent it and all of our efforts to dissect it end up leaving us as mystified as ever.  There are a million different stanzas and an equally large number of musical scores that bespeak of our love for “love,” but it still evades us. It’s abundantly clear that we’ve in love with “love.”  But what in the world is it?

 

Feeling or Decision?

Is love a feeling or a decision?  We can say with some certainty that love is a deep human emotion where the most fundamental of our passions are stirred. There’s something so powerful about love that people have risen to unbelievable heights and achieved phenomenal things because of love.  On the other side of that, people have also plunged to frightening lows that some individuals never crawl out of.  Love is a powerful emotion that makes us uniquely human and gives us the ability to do things we never imagined we could do.  But, is love a feeling or a decision?

 

What if Love is Both?

Indeed,true love is a profound emotion. However, it must move beyond an emotion simply because love without a decision that throws love into action is love that is in the very process of dying.  Love without a decision never moves love outside of itself.  Love without a decision never touches anyone but us. Love without a decision will utterly rob us of the very miracles that only love can pull off.  Love without a decision, or a decision without love will both fail miserably.     

And so we choose.  We choose when it hurts to choose.  We choose when the choice may cost us dearly.  We choose when not choosing seems the better choice.  We choose when everyone around us deems such a choice as absolutely lunacy because they’ve forgotten what love is.  We choose because love will never be unleashed unless we make a decision to unleash it.

 

Love as the Expression of True Living

There’s one final thing about real love that makes it unique.  In fact, it might be the most important thing.  Living and sacrificing in love gives life an authentic richness far superior to a life that’s invested in just taking, or trying to give based on some cost/benefit analysis.  Love is first and foremost about how it helps someone else.  But in sacrificing for someone else something powerful returns to us. Love kind of splashes back on us. It will eventually come full circle possessing more than what we’d sent it out with.  That’s enriching in ways that are truly great.  Make a decision to love and it will return.  Make a choice and you will be loved.  Choose to love and you’ll end up falling in love with loving.