Love Life Word Work

For me the habit of rising late in the morning, turning on the television and sitting there ‘bone idle’ is just about the guiltiest-feeling things one could do. According to my anxious conscience, non-industriousness is one of the most shameful sins. Mind you, I’m not saying my conscience helps me be more industrious—it doesn’t. I’m just not driven in fact by the puritanical work ethic. That is, I am not driven to get out and get money six days a week. I do not wrack my brain trying to figure out ways to get other peoples’ money and get it into my bank account. Sometimes I wish I had more of that in my system.

But no, I usually just do the work that finds me. And it does usually find me. I am blessed to be on the first-call list at Measurement, Inc. We don’t work all the time, five or six months out of the year at the most. When they call I go. I work hard for them.

Then when the test-scoring season is over it seems like someone will usually call me to do some remodeling work. It’s not my favorite thing to do but I’m thankful to be asked and I always try to do a good job and not waste their money.

And so this year when the test-scoring season was over we were told there would be no more projects till February of next year. We asked again and were told sympathetically, there are absolutely no more projects in the pipeline for this year. And so I went home, deposited my last paycheck and paid as many bills with it as I could.

After that the bills started to pile up. I get a good feeling from paying living expenses with money I worked for. But if there is no money then there is no good feeling; just the opposite, there is anxiety.

Now, you are probably thinking, ‘where is your faith, Joe?’ And you very well should be thinking that because it is a pertinent question. But do me a favor and don’t be so quick on the draw, will you? I believe God is taking care of us but I don’t believe He guarantees to “show us the money” every time.

And so, on the morning of September 18 when I watched a movie on TV instead of attempting to do some work that might (possibly) bring me some income, I found the last thing I expected—a message from God. There is nothing like a message from God to fill one with a sense of meaning.

When I sense meaning I want to write. In this case the Dallas Willard writing was on deck in my mind so, here’s that last paragraph of the three:

Our hunger for significance is a signal of who we are and why we are here, and it also is the basis of humanity’s enduring response to Jesus. For he always takes individual human beings as seriously as their shredded dignity demands, and he has the resources to carry through with his high estimate of them.

And so, when it comes to our sense of significance, we are not satiated and never will be in this life—not by a long shot. For most of us and for most of our lives we will have to be satisfied with the hunger alone. But there is a greatness just in the hungering after a thing that comes from God.

For the significance, the meaning, the life, the love that comes from God is an eternal thing, and a heavenly thing. It is a substance that has to do with God’s kingdom. And hunger in the kingdom of God is like no other kind of hunger. For in the hunger is the food. And with God always—to hunger is to be filled.

The next paragraph from Dallas Willard’s The Divine Conspiracy:

Unlike egotism, the drive to significance is a simple extension of the creative impulse of God that gave us being. It is not filtered through self-consciousness any more than is our lunge to catch a package falling from someone’s hand. It is outwardly directed to the good to be done. We were built to count, as water is made to run downhill. We are placed in a specific context to count in ways no one else does. That is our destiny.

Even more hope. I love this. It underscores the reconciliation that I already believe in but do not always feel the effects of.

I have been hungering mightily for a sense of significance. My faith says it is there but my day to day existence claims it is not. Whether we are overworked or underworked we are susceptible to the gremlin of meaninglessness. We reach out and try to connect. We look to our friends, pastors, family members, trying to see in their faces a positive reflection of ourselves that will show us we have meaning. Meaning, or significance, is even more important than health, comfort, financial security. I have found myself saying again and again, I can weather the hard times as long as I can see meaning in them. But I need to see meaning in my life as a whole. I need my life story to be meaningful. Maybe part of the trouble is I can’t see the big picture; all I can see, hear, smell, taste and feel are the particular things that are right in front of me at any one time.

And so I rise and fall with the wind and waves. If I’m in a depression I can’t see the horizon—I can’t even see any hope in the morning for the afternoon. Sometimes I even feel guilty longing for significance, like it were one of those idols I must lay on the altar of God. But Dr. Willard’s words refute that feeling of guilt for me. He reminds me that I was created for meaning, for signicance, in order to do good in my immediate vicinity as well as in the world at large. So I am supposed to look for significance. My friend Dave Durham said just last Sunday that seeking the kingdom of God is the same as looking for the kingdom. We look for the kingdom around us and we see it. In the same way we look for significance and see it in the love that flows from God—the love that makes good everything in creation.

Now the best part of this middle paragraph (the metaphorical cherry on this “word sundae”, if you will), is the personal ID in the last part. We each have a “specific context” in which God has made us, and we each have a particular flavor to our life that no one else has, or ever will have. For me this is like a hand on my shoulder blessing me, letting me know in no uncertain terms that life is worth living for me, even for the ne’er-do-well, ne’er-’er-gonna-do-well melancholic me.

So why did I even mention (in the previous entry) the film “The Girl in the Cafe”? Because it is a parable of meaning coming out of circumstances that had no apparent meaning and, for a person like me (or like you), that is well worth noting.

This morning after checking my email and my ebay I sat down in front of the television with coffee and got pulled in by a British movie about a socially backward government functionary and a quiet younger lady with whom he was attempting to socialize. After a couple of quiet dates with her he invites her to go to Reykyavik with him to a conference he had to attend. After all he had a second ticket he wasn’t using. It turned out to be a lot more than he bargained for. By being herself, a plain young woman with a particular story, the lady ended up changing her shy friend and history to boot. They have the movie rotating on HBO right now. The Girl in the Cafe with Richard Nighy and Kelly MacDonald. It was a quiet and sometimes awkward movie, no big moments, no chase scenes, but I liked it. It meant something beyond itself to me—that’s what we need from a film, isn’t it after all?

So after the credits started to roll I checked mail again and there was my good friend Rob F. answering my sad, sad message of 36 hours ago. He was wanting to find practical ways he can help me grasp the hope I need for the future. I am thankful for such a friend as he. I’ll call him and let him know I am coming to myself. And I am—after about six weeks of unemployment and depression. Six weeks of waking up every morning to thoughts of “where am I going to get money for the bills”. Six weeks of coffee, oatmeal, peanut butter and bologna (not together). Six weeks of fooling with web stuff (for donations). I sold a few books on ebay (more trouble than it’s worth), I called in all my IOU’s, which weren’t many. I fiddled with a couple old laptops that were donated to me, cleansing them of the too-sluggish Windows 98 and experimenting at installing linux distros. I learned a lot, and when I went to sell them I learned that people don’t really want to buy a laptop with a linux OS. Oh well … which brings me what I really want to say.
A couple nights ago, while I was watching and waiting the three and a half hours it would take to install the afore-mentioned linux operating system on an old off-brand (but aesthetically beautiful) laptop, I looked for a book to read in the gaps between the steps in the install process. The book I found was The Divine Conspiracy by Dallas Willard. I had read it (from the library) before, and afterwards found a used copy at a second-hand store. I let it set a while but finally picked it up again. When I began to read I had to think, ‘this is great stuff, did I really read this before? I don’t remember it being this good.’ Then I came to a passage that touched me so deeply I had to get a pencil and mark it. Then I read the next and had to bracket that, then the next. I ended up with three paragraphs, each bracketed separately. Here’s the first:

Egotism is pathological self-obsession, a reaction to anxiety about whether one really does count. It is a form of acute self-consciousness and can be prevented and healed only by the experience of being adequately loved. It is, indeed, a desperate response to frustration of the need we all have to count for something and be held to be irreplaceable, without price.

Now I must say I would not have marked this paragraph about “pathological self-obsession” except for the fact that it ended so well, even beautifully. For me the beauty hit me with the word “healed”—because healing is exactly what I (and many people I love) need.

Now, turning back to the first sentence, I didn’t think of myself as egotistical or self-obsessed, but when it comes to being healed by being adequately loved … well, I might come pretty close to pleading on that. Like Charles Colson, who pleaded guilty to the Watergate conspiracy—not because he did that particular crime, but because he had done other crimes of equal value and wanted to submit to justice, I feel a pull to submit to justice. Not out of a desire to be punished but out of a desire to be healed. What am I guilty of?

I am addicted to loving the inside of the walls of my own soul more than the living creatures who surround me every single day. I hug those walls and the images that I have projected on them—fantastic and phantasmal images with no real substance—fancy words for my persistent semi-belief that “nobody loves me, everybody hates me.” And if that’s not self-obsession I don’t know what is.

Then to close the paragraph, Dr. Willard goes on about our need, the unfulfillment of which sorrows us all, to be meaningfully, even infinitely, valued. Go back and read the blockquote above. It is almost poetic. I can’t explain it or expound upon it satisfactorily; I am writing about it just to show that it has touched me for the good.

By the way, about that cute little laptop, FedoraCore was too ponderous for the thing. I ended up formatting and installing another free linux distro, this time achieving operational equilibrium with the fast and light VectorLinux.

My next post will be about Dallas Willard’s next paragraph which I bracketed in pencil.

We all have co-workers; we have many kinds of co-working relationships. Some of our work relationships are supposed to be egalitarian, most are not nonetheless. Co-working has many ramifications; not all of us are good at it. Remember the scores we got on our report cards for “Works well with others”? I don’t remember what my scoress were; I was always concerned with my “regular subjects.”

Now, we believers have a Co-Worker who is omnipotent and we are in a whole new league.

How does one work with the Omnipotent? Søren Kierkegaard said it well—”in blessedness and terror.” It’s not easy to partner with the Omnipotent, it’s hard enough to partner with a near-equal. But God is omnipotent and we are able to do nothing at all.

But we find that almost impossible to live with. There is such a lot riding on the thing—our standing in the community, for instance. No one likes to think he is going to be shown out to be the incompetent—the lazy one—the one who cannot pull one’s own weight. I know I don’t like being the person who cannot interface successfully with the business world, but whether I like it or not I am that person. Mind you, I am very good at doing quite a few things—but I am not capable of turning those skills into money. It’s just not in my character.

I run out of money and the bills pile up. Then, after struggling with guilt and shame and fighting with myself about whether I should beg donations for my volunteer web work, I finally go ahead and beg and feel bad for asking for a love-gift. When I stop and think I recollect all the things I did out of love for my web people. I put my passion into their web sites and hoped they would not think I was doing it for gain, and I wasn’t … or was I? I was really doing it to gain their love, to hoodwink them into loving me if I may be so frank. Ha. And I was doing it all without regard for my omnipotent Co-Worker, or without much regard. Doing God’s work without noticing Him. If I thought of Him at all it was a fast and fleeting thought, because I am good at fixing up web sites and I am good at fixing them fast. I love doing that and I love having people say, “Joe sure knows a lot about web stuff.”

And so, I am an example of a person—as most of us are—who is not good at working well with others, particularly our Omnipotent Other. We think we are good alone, or no-good alone—but alone nonetheless. Because we forgot we have an omnipotent Co-Worker.

Kierkegaard went on to say, “if he is your co-worker, you are able to do everything.” And so, there is a paradox to add to our body of paradox that is the Christian life.

God is omnipotent. We are powerless.
God is our Co-Worker. We are empowered.

It’s a hard road but we must walk it out. We have to bear it in mind one hundred percent of the time. We must never let it slip away … but we do. And when it slips away, not only do we get off-balance, but we begin to imagine we are alone; He is nowhere to be found. It’s a falsehood but then we would often rather believe falsehoods.

We have to go down spiralling, tailspinning, grasping at our phantom ripcords. We have to get confused—can’t see which way is up, in order to right ourselves.

God is omnipotent, but not seen. None of our kin have seen Him. But somehow or another we know—we must believe that He is the only One can surrender to. And so we do.