The Best Decision for Us Today

I recently returned from a retreat on discernment led by Ruth Haley Barton as part of her Transforming Community. Ruth teaches, writes, and practices great stuff in regard to becoming discerning people and organizations. The church and world are desperately in need of her wisdom and the practices she encourages in this area. Leading up to this retreat, our group had already been together each quarter for 3 days over 18 months with shared commitments and practices that have brought us to being more the kind of people who could soak in and apply good advice from Ruth and others about receiving God's guidance in our lives. As she often points out, it's silly for us to expect discernment from undiscerning people. But thankfully, because of reliable rhythms of the spiritual life that we have practiced together over the last year and a half, many of us are at a place where we are ready for better ways of listening for and following God (and are desperate to do so).

Ruth encouraged us to come into this retreat with a decision, big or small, to take into the discernment process. That was easy for me to do, and Ruth's teaching on both the habit and practice of discernment were very helpful. I didn't leave the retreat with any clear decisions made, but I did leave with a clear assurance: We can never go wrong by making the choice that helps us to be more fully God's.

Certainly some decisions carry more weight than others. We understand the impact that the choice of a spouse or a career can have on our lives, and many other important decisions are of lesser importance. But there's a part of us that understands that we never really know the extent to which a decision is going to impact our lives. For example, I knew that choosing to leave home and attend Asbury College fourteen years ago was a big decision; I had no idea how much it would impact the rest of my life. The people I met, the passion for study that I found, and the opportunities that came my way in the course of living out that decision ended up having tremendous impact: my wife, the jobs I've had, the friends I turn to, and much of the kind of person I am have all been very heavily influenced by that decision. That's a very positive example, but we all know that the negative examples exist too.

If you're like me, someone to whom deciding correctly is of inestimable value, the unknown future impact of our current decisions can feel paralyzing. What if we choose wrongly? Or what if we miss choosing what's best?

I entered the retreat feeling those fears, and when I left I understood that yes, decisions involve risk. A decision may or may not end up with things going as well as possible, or being the most lucrative in a variety of ways. In those terms, we may make the wrong decision, but... we never know ahead of time how those things will play out. And while I don't know those things, I usually do have an idea of which choice(s) will most effectively help me be more fully God's. I usually have some idea of which option(s) will be more conducive to growing Jesus' kind of character in me, so that qualities like love, joy, peace, patience, and kindness are most likely to grow in me. If I choose in favor of that, I cannot choose wrongly.

One of my heroes, Stu, taught me this in different words a long time ago when he said, "Make sure you're in God's will today, and you won't miss being in it tomorrow." The best decision for you and I today, regardless of which day of our lives today is, is always to be more fully God's, because God always has- and always will- see that we are cared for.

(If you're in leadership and want to know more about Ruth's ideas on discernment, check out her outstanding book, Strengthening the Soul of Your Leadership, particularly Chapter 12.)

There's Nothing in the Election Coverage About This...

Although I'm never very involved beyond voting, I enjoy paying attention to politics. Of course there are things that greatly annoy me about listening to candidates or people in office, and one is how high a degree of confidence they usually ask us to have in them to accomplish incredible things. The reality is that there are things politicians can and should accomplish and other things that simply aren't in their domain or range of possibilities to see come to pass. Every election includes numerous candidates talking about "cleaning house" in Washington, fighting for the people, making our futures more secure and generally giving us good lives. As he always is, Dallas Willard is the master of offering a different perspective:

"We must at some point stop looking for new information or social arrangements or religious experiences that will draw off the evil in the world at large, abolish war, hunger, oppression, and so forth, while letting us continue to be and to live as we have since Adam... The monstrous evils we deplore are in fact the strict causal consequences of the spirit and behavior of 'normal' human beings following generally acceptable patterns of life. They are not the result of strange flukes, accidental circumstances, or certain especially mad or bad individuals." (From The Spirit of the Disciplines, p. 234)

As much as politicians talk about social arrangements and things like war, hunger, and opression, they rarely say anything about solutions that actually have the potential of a deeper answer to our problems: people changing their lifestyles, both individually and in mass, to allow more room for God to change us and our world. I don't expect candidates to talk much about these things, and honestly that's okay. It is primarily the responsibility of the Christian church (you and me) to put this to the test, and once reliable ways are found (or better, rediscovered) of living the life that is truly life, we should invite others to join us. So, church, the entire world is waiting on our progress in discipleship.

Big Spenders, Over-Savers, or Contentment and Generosity

I think that in a very broad and over-generalized way, every one of us becomes one of three kinds of people. It’s probably more accurate that we’re a mix of all three of these than just one of them, but by the end of my life, I think it’s true that people will be able to look back at the things I did and place me into one of the three of these categories:

Either we become
  • a big spender,
  • an over-saver,
  • or someone that lives in contentment and generosity.

 

If I don’t intentionally make the decision to let the ways of the kingdom of God shape my finances, rather than letting my finances shape me, then I will most likely end up being either a big spender or an over-saver. In an average day, you and I receive 600 advertising messages, and almost all of them are trying to get us to be one of these two kinds of people. I mean, how often have you seen a commercial whose point was, “be content with what you have”? No, the tactic they take is by telling us that if we don’t spend in big quantities or save everything we have, then bad things are going to happen to us. Again, in one of the books from James Bryan Smith's Apprentice Series, The Good and Beautiful Life, it says,
“Advertisers know how to play on our fears and desires. By the age of sixty we will have seen over two million commercials, which is the equivalent of watching nothing but those ads for eight hours a day, seven days a week, for six straight years. While they appeal to desire, more ads tapping into our fears get us to buy their products."
Then it has this quote from Martin Lindstrom that explains:
"Practically every brand category I can think of plays on fear, either directly or indirectly. We’re sold medicines to ward off depression, diet pills and gym memberships to prevent obesity, creams and ointments to quiet fears of aging, and even computer software to ward off the terrors of our hard drive crashing. I predict that in the near future advertising will be based more and more on fear-driven somatic markers, as advertisers attempt to scare us into believing that not buying their product will make us feel less safe, less happy, less free, and less in control of our lives.” (pp. 164-165)
So for the big spenders, the messages are presented in different words, but  they go something like this:
  • “You’ve got to have these clothes so that people will think of you the right way.”
  • “You have to buy your wife this big diamond or she may not kiss you anymore.”
  • “You need this new kind of phone or computer, or you won’t be able to get anything accomplished.”
  • “You’ve got to drive this kind of car, with a great stereo and GPS and all of these safety features, or you’ll likely get into an accident you and all of your loved ones will probably die.”

 

I guess it’s harder to advertise to the over-savers, because by definition one is less likely to make money off of them, but the professionals find ways to do it. For the over-savers, the advertisements are something like these:
  • “You need to invest now in gold, because the entire economy could collapse around us, and at least when it does, then you would own some gold.” (Recently I was using a site that I use often to look up scripture and there was an ad there encouraging me to buy gold that said, “It was given to Jesus by the wise men; wise men still own it today.” So, according to them, an important way to let my life be shaped by the scriptures is by investing in gold???)
  • Or the ads might be pushing insurance policies, sure-thing investments for retirement. Or how about the car that can get you better gas mileage by 10 miles per gallon?

 

This is a bit of a tangent- from me, not the Bible, but that last one gets to me, because let’s say that what I drive right now gets 20 miles per gallon. I know that I spend a lot on gas, and I’m a big saver, so when the commercial comes on for the new thing that will get me 30 miles per gallon, I start thinking of all of that money I’ll save on gas. But, they’re counting on us not doing the math. If a gallon of gas costs $2.75, and even if I average driving 25,000 miles in a year, and the new car costs $20,000, it would take 17 1/2 years for me to break even on the money I save on gas with my new gas saver versus the money I had to spend to get it. And that’s if I paid cash... if I take out a loan for that new gas saver, it would likely take me at two decades to break even on the deal.
Now, I’ve got a lot of saver in me, so for all of you fellow savers, I don’t have anything against good gas mileage, or retirement plans, or insurance policies, or investments. And for you spenders, I don’t have anything against computers or diamonds or clothes. All I’m trying to do is to get us to ask ourselves: in what or in whom do we hope, trust, and believe? Paul said it very well in 1 Timothy 6:17-19; we either hope in wealth, which is so uncertain, or we hope in God, who richly provides us with everything for our enjoyment. I’m trying to help us see that when we do not decide to let the ways of the kingdom of God shape our finances, our finances easily come to rule us by making us into a big spender or an over-saver.
Part of the reason this is true is because apart from the kingdom of God, it becomes so easy to be motivated by fear- either (for the big spenders) fear that we aren’t valuable without more stuff, or (for the over-savers) fear that we have to save all we can to try to protect our own futures. And these fears always stay a few steps ahead of our finances. Our finances will never quite be able to catch up to those things we’re afraid of. The big spenders will never have quite enough things and the over-savers will never have quite enough stored away.
John D. Rockefeller was born in 1839 and died 98 years later in 1937. He was the wealthiest man in the world, and was the first American to be worth more than a billion dollars. At his death, he was worth $1.4 billion, and that was a long time ago... adjusting for inflation, he is regarded as the richest man in history. What was $1.4 billion then would be $20.7 billion today. (Based on the first salary I had out of college, it would take me 1500 years to make that much money!) ... One day a reporter asked him how much money it would take to make him happy, and Rockefeller’s famous reply was, “Just a little bit more.”
Apart from the kingdom of God, we always need “just a little bit more,” and we work to satisfy our fears through spending to make ourselves feel happy or saving to make ourselves feel secure. But our finances never quite reach far enough, we never become the content and generous people that we wanted to be.
So what’s the other option? If we hope that at the end of our lives we it will have been obvious to others that we were neither big spenders, nor over-savers, but joyful men and women who lived with contentment and generosity, how do we make that happen? I'm no financial counselor, and won't pretend to be. Plenty of great information on the how-to of this is available from folks like Dave Ramsey or Crown Ministries. The only point I'm attempting to establish is that there’s a decision that we have to make intentionally, a decision about which will be placed in that central place in our hearts: will it be the kingdom of God, or will it be our own resources?

Everything Adds Up

A powerful general principle in the spiritual life is this: everything adds up. Everything counts, and moves us in one direction or another, including small things. It isn’t generally the big things of our lives that play the largest role in shaping who we are, but all of the small things that add up over the course of our lifetimes. All of things we put into our minds add up. All of the decisions we make about our time add up, and on the other side of all of them, we become the kind of person that is naturally the sum of all of those things, because everything adds up. In his book, Falling for God, Gary Moon relates a great illustration of this is in a parable called “Crumbs and Bubbles” by Safed the Sage. It’s the story about Safed, who is spending a quiet day with his granddaughter when it begins to snow. The little girl looks out the window and notices the fluffy, falling flakes. She asks her grandfather to take her outside to play in the snow, and he cannot refuse.

Once outside, the little girl begins to giggle with delight as the snow comes down. She says, “Look grandpa, the snow is making crumbs and bubbles.”

When he asks her what she means by crumbs and bubbles, she explains, “The bubbles are falling against your face, Grandpa, and turn to water. But the crumbs land on your overcoat. They don’t melt and you can brush them off. Watch."

Safed marvels at the way the small child put the words together to describe her new experiences. They spend the day enjoying the crumbs and bubbles until the cold sends them inside to thaw out by their fireplace.

The next morning he awakens and notices how quiet everything has become. There is no movement outside, no noise from trains, cars, or footsteps. He looks out the window and observes that the snow has fallen in great drifts and brought the entire town to a hault.

Then he remembers the cute words of his granddaughter and how she described the crumbs and bubbles of snow, which have now piled up in such great drifts that they can stop a powerful train.

Then he unpacks the parable and says, “I considered that it is even so with many things in life that are small in themselves, but when multiplied they become habits that people cannot break, or grievances that rend friendships asunder, even as great drifts are made of bubbles and crumbs of snow.”

Snowflakes add up to make snowdrifts, just as the things we allow our minds to dwell on and the decisions we make about our time add up to make a person- either a person whose character is very significantly like that of Jesus, or a person whose character isn’t; they add up making me the kind of person that I want to be, or to something less.

C.S. Lewis also describes this well. He says in Mere Christianity, “Every time you make a choice [and I’ll add here- a choice about what to do with your time] you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different from what it was before. And taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, all your life long you are slowly turning this central thing either into a Heaven creature or into a hellish creature: either into a creature that is in harmony with God, and with other creatures, and with itself, or else into one that is in a state of war and hatred with God, and with its fellow creatures, and with itself. To be the one kind of creature is Heaven: that is, it is joy, and peace, and knowledge, and power. To be the other means madness, horror, idiocy, rage, impotence, and eternal loneliness. Each of us at each moment is progressing to the one state or the other.”

Everything adds up, and this is one of the core ideas of understanding spiritual formation, because we are, always, being formed into some kind of person. This is true whether we know it or not, and living as a disciple of Jesus is largely about learning to recognize this and pay attention to it.

 

You Spend Eight Months of Your Life Opening Junk Mail

Our church is studying John Ortberg's book, The Me I Want to Be, and I really appreciate the framework it gives us for describing the life of a disciple of Jesus. Paraphrasing from the overall structure of the book (and the groundbreaking accompanying tool called Monvee), disciples of Jesus are careful with how their lives are arranged in these four areas: our minds, our time, our relationships, and our experiences for others. This post is from my message on redeeming the time, which ties together the first two of these areas.

In Ephesians 5, Paul instructs, “Be careful then how you live, not as unwise people but as wise, making the most of the time, because the days are evil. So do not be foolish, but understand what the will of the Lord is.” Or, I appreciate how some of the older translations say it, encouraging us to “redeem the time.”
Obviously Paul understood that, in his day, redeeming the time was an important part of people learning to live wisely. If it was important then, it is at least as important today. While it has always been a key element of living wisely, perhaps the need has never been more urgent than it is for us today, and all of the signs in our world point to this urgency continuing to become more and more pressing.
Consider these facts that James Bryan Smith shares in his book which our Apprentice Groups study, The Good and Beautiful God. He says that, in a lifetime, an average person spends:
  • six months at traffic lights
  • eight months opening junk mail
  • one year searching through desk clutter
  • two years trying to call people who are not in
  • three years in meetings
  • five years waiting in lines
In a single day an average American will
  • commute 45 minutes
  • be interrupted 73 times
  • receive 600 advertising messages
  • watch 4 hours of television
We must learn to redeem the time!
There is quite a bit of overlap between how disciples of Jesus through the centuries have arranged their lives in respect to their time, and how they have arranged them in respect to their minds. Time is always passing. We can neither slow it down nor speed it up. It just is what it is, without respect to what we think about it. Sometimes we feel like time is on our side, and other times it’s a fierce enemy, like for the old basketball coach who said that his teams never lost a single game, they only ran out of time. It’s similar with our minds, because as time is always passing, our minds are always absorbing the things that we put into them, whether those things be helpful or destructive. Paul urged Christians to be transformed by the renewint of their minds, because he understood that the kind of people that you and I are becoming is largely the outcome of how we think. If we “set our minds on things above,” and think great thoughts over the course of our lives, our habits of thinking will play tremendous roles in determining the character that is in us when we come to our last days. And it’s the same with our time.
I’ll invite you to do a mental exercise with me to illustrate. Take a moment and bring to mind a person that you have greatly admired. It may be someone you have known personally, or perhaps you only admired them from a distance, but bring to mind someone whose quality of character has inspired you.
Have someone in mind? Now bring to mind someone as unlike that person as you can think of. Again, it may be someone you have known well or not, but think of someone whose life and character is to you the epitome of being un-admirable. You may even feel a knot rise up in your stomach at these thoughts.
Now, think of the lives that these two people led which either developed them into very admirable or un-admirable people. Two things that are surely differences between them are the ways that they thought and what they did with the 24 hours per day that each of them were given. The un-admirable person in your mind surely had long patterns of thinking un-admirable thoughts, and this led them to use their time in un-admirable ways. And just as surely, the admirable person in your mind took Paul’s advice when he said in Philippians 4, “whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.” Then, these patterns of thinking led them to use the time that they were given in ways that made them into people who were true, honorable, just, pure, pleasing, commendable, and praiseworthy, because we really do become what we think.

John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, paid a lot of attention to these things. He was extremely careful, even highly meticulous with his time, keeping records of what he did hour by hour, and recording the activities of his days in his journals. He lived in such a watchful way over his own time, because he understood the role that what we do with our time has in shaping who we become.
Wesley talked often about “redeeming the time.” He said, “[Save] all the time you can for the best purposes; buying up every fleeting moment out of the hands of sin and Satan.”
And I love this quote from him: “Redeem the time. Improve the present moment. Buy up every opportunity of growing in grace, or of doing good. Let not the thought of receiving more grace tomorrow make you negligent of today.”

 

Renewing My Mind and Redeeming My Time

I haven't written much to post lately, largely because I've been preaching more than usual. So, just incase you're interested, here are videos (and audio is available here): [vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/15407408 w=400&h=300] The Me I Want to Be: Changing Your Mind (CWS) from First United Methodist Church on Vimeo.

[vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/15411493 w=400&h=300] The Me I Want to Be: The Energizing Impact of Scripture from First United Methodist Church on Vimeo.