a drop of water

No, I’m not talking about sadness :)

John Calvin, preaching to his congregation in Geneva, Switzerland, pointed out that we must develop better and deeper concepts of happiness than those held by the world, which makes a happy life to consist on “ease, honours, and great wealth”  Too much of the world’s happiness depends on taking from one to satisfy another.  To increase my standard of living, people in another part of the world must lower theirs. The worldwide crisis of hunger that we face today is a result of that method of pursuing happiness.”

This was a sobering quote from Eugene Peterson’s, A Long Obedience In the Same Direction.  We like to quantify what will make us happy by what we can receive (what can I get out of life), completely ignoring the form of happiness found in what we can give.  Happiness has an inherent power to be passed on; truly happy people are empowered to do what it takes to make those around them happy as well.  Happinesses’ longevity is stifled when it stops at consumption before it is passed on.  The mark of a joyful person is their ability to bring joy into someone elses life.

Johannes Pederson words it like this: ”Life consists in the constant meeting of souls, which must share their contents with each other.  The blessed gives to the others, because the strength instinctively pours from him and up around him . . . . The characteristic of blessing is to multiply.”

Black Friday (Black Saturday, Cyber Monday, etc), when retailers pull the hood over as many people as they can, turning the once thankful-for-what-they-already-have-thanksgiving-celebrators into crazed-employee-trampling-door-busting-ready-to-buy-stuff-they-already-have-consumers in a span of 24hrs (or less), so that they [the retailers] can get a jump on holiday revenue, seems a little silly [stronger word needed here] as they try to inject people with the fleeting idea that buying more stuff that they already have, for only slightly reduced prices, will bring them happiness.  What if, instead, we had a Free Friday where the massive institution of retailers tried to make a difference by giving to the people who couldn’t normally afford to be their customers?

Maybe not the “happiest” business model from a bottom line point of view, but maybe thats the point.  That the success, the happiness, etc of a business can not just be limited to an inward bottom line focus just like our own individual happiness can not be fully realized by an inward focus on what happens to us as individuals. The missing aspect of our happiness is the relational giving and passing on act that is rooted in the thanksgiving that we have in God’s provision.  So today, my challenge is, not just to be thankful for what I have, but to see if I can give a bit of that happiness to someone else.

I was reading Chapter 2 of Dallas Willard’s, Renovation of the Heart, and came across this break down of the human life on page 30.

1. Thought (images, concepts, judgments, inferences)
2. Feeling (sensation, emotion)
3. Choice (will, decision, character)
4. Body (action, interaction with the physical world)
5. Social context (personal and structural relations to others)
6. Soul (the factor that integrates all of the above to form one life)

I’m finding it helpful to evaluate my spiritual health in regards to each of these areas.  I’d like to make it a regular habit, because often life’s experiences magnify one area out of proportion.  It’s easy for us to dissociate one aspect of our lives in order to focus on just that.  Alone, each of these areas are thought to be manageable, but when considered together, the result is overwhelming.  But I believe that our spiritual health depends on the integration of all the parts.

They are all equally important and interdependent; some may be more important than others for a time, but their relation to each other has the potential to enhance and empower.  The true health of our soul in light of a redemptive plan, seems to depend on our lives integration of each complimenting God designed area.  Some brief questions that I’ve considered:

1. (Thought) – Where do my thoughts go in my free time?
2. (Feeling) – Where do I feel content in my life?
3. (Choice) – What choices in my life reflect my thoughts and feelings?
4. (Body) – Where am I being available with energy for people?
5. (Social Context) – Who am I lovingly investing in?
6. (Soul) – How compartmentalized is my life?

But–I reemphasize, because it is so important–the primary “learning” here is not about how to act, just as the primary wrongness or problem in human life is not what we do.  Often what human beings do is so horrible that we can be excused, perhaps, for thinking that all that matters is stopping it.  But this is an evasion of the real horror: the heart from which the terrible actions come.  In both cases, it is who we are in our thoughts, feelings, dispositions, and choices–in the inner life–that counts.  Profound transformation therefore is the only thing that can definitively conquer outward evil.

It is very hard to keep this straight.  Failure to do so is a primary cause of failure to grow spiritually.  Love, we hear, is patient and kind (1 Corinthians 13:4).  Then we mistakenly try to be loving by acting patiently and kindly–and quickly fail.  We should always do the best we can in action, of course; but little progress is to be made in that arena until we advance in love itself — the genuine inner readiness and longing to secure the good of others.  Until we make significant progress there, our patience and kindness wil be shallow and short-lived at best.

It is love itself–not loving behavior, or even the wish or intent to love–that has the power to “always protect, always trust, always hope, put up with anything and never quit” (1 Corinthians 13:7-8, PAR).  Merely trying to act lovingly will lead to despair and to the defeat of love.  It will make us angry and hopeless.

But taking love itself,–God’s kind of love–into the depths of our being through spiritual formation will, by contrast, enable us to act lovingly to an extent that will be surprising even to ourselves, at first.  And this love will then become a constant source of joy and refreshment to ourselve and others.  Indeed it will be, according to the promise, “a well of water springing up to eternal life” (John 4:14)–not an additional burden to carry through life, as “acting lovingly” surely would be.

p.24, Renovation of the Heart, Dallas Willard

“Joy is not a requirement of Christian discipleship, it is a consequence.”
Eugene Peterson – p.96, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction

Those who I look up to are always joyful.  Even with the greeting in passing, their joy is contagious.  That is something I wish I could give to people, a contagious joy.  It is not just a contagious joy rooted in their innate ability to hope for the best, but in their belief in God and humility to see the good that is happening.  Peterson notes that “joy is not a moral requirement for Christian living” since we will “experience events that are full of sadness and pain” and that we should never conclude that “I’m not joyful, therefore I must not be christian.”

That truth in evidenced by those who I look up to who are seemingly always joyful.  Their life circumstances are not any different that mine, often much harder and more trying when you get to know what they face daily.  Peterson emphasizes that joy (and other christian ways of living) is not something “we have to acquire in order to experience life in Christ; it is what comes to us when we are walking in the way of faith and obedience.”

So often I find myself chasing after fruits of faith and obedience, only to realize that I’ve tried to play without reading the directions.  It is when I focus on the simplest things in life, God’s presence, his leading, and trying to be his hands and feet in the here and now that joy comes, because it puts the complexity and the overwhelming issue and problems in their place, in Gods hand.  That is where I want my joy to come from; any other source else is shortlived.

Andy Crouch in his book, Culture Making, discusses a relational model where creativity creates.  Many successful companies and other sources of things created are led by a group of three, that is to say a small small, tight knit group of like minded creators, working together for a common goal.  Often I try to create things on my own, but that only goes so far.  When I involve too many people, the vision gets construed and pulled in so many directions, theres nothing left after everyones had their say.  Crouch goes on to say beyond that intimate group where creativity creates, are two, farther removed layers of input.  A group of 12 and a group of 120, similar to a board of directors and a group of team managers if this model is to be liked to a business model.  The group of 12 has more input and authority than the group of 120, but less than the group of 3, yet each tier plays an important role and contributes towards the end result.

“The essential insight of 3 : 12 : 120 is that every cultural innovation, no matter how far-reaching its consequences, is based on personal relationships and personal commitment.  Culture making is hard.  It simply doesn’t happen without the investment of absolutely and relatively small groups of people.  In culture making, size matters–in reverse.  Only a small group can sustain the attention, energy and perseverance to create something that genuinely moves the horizons of possibility–because to create that good requires an ability to suspend, at least for a time, the very horizons within which everyone else is operating.  Such “suspension of impossibility” is tiring and taxing.  The only thing strong enough to sustain it is a community of people.  To create a new cultural good, a small group is essential.”  p. 243

Prayerfully I will find that small group of people that I can make culture with and together we can cross the obstacles that stand in the way of personal relationships and personal commitment that sustains the energy and perseverance required to create something that “genuinely moves the horizons of possibility.”  I want to find significance in what I do with my friends.  When I was in grade school, I always had a dream of starting a company with my friends.  Each of us had different skills and talents and it made sense to bring our relationships into the sphere of work for efficiency and productivity.  There is something refreshingly redeeming about Crouch’s advocacy of “measuring our significane not by our access to power, people and institutions, but by how faithful we remain [in our small groups], to the cultural goods we seek to cultivate and create!”