“Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength. Keep these words that I am commanding you today in your heart. Recite them to your children and talk about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise. Bind them as a sign on your hand, fix them as an emblem on your forehead, and write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.”
(Deuteronomy 6.4-5; see also Mark 12.29-30; Matthew 22.37; and Luke 10.27)
You have the ability to give yourself a truly wonderful gift. You have the ability to give yourself a gift that will benefit and enrich your life in a whole multitude of ways. You have the ability to give yourself a gift that will bless and enrich the lives of the people around you. You have the ability to give yourself a gift that God is encouraging you to receive, because God desires that your life be filled with joy.
It took me years to realize this. It took me years of soul-searching and internal struggle. It took me years of asking questions and pondering possible answers. It took me years of patient listening and painful mistakes along the way. Eventually, as I ruminated on my life and the Christian witness and the intersection between the two, some light bulbs started to go off in my head. I began to see some things in a new way. I began to try some things I’d been afraid to try. I began to see the simplicity of it all. I began to experience new joy in my life. Not that I’ve completed that journey, oh no, not by a longshot. I have a tremendous amount of growing and learning yet to do. But I think I’ve learned enough in this life so far to believe that I’m on to something – on to something important.
It’s right there, in the pages of the scriptures. It’s the verse from the Old Testament scriptures that Jesus lifts up as “the greatest commandment” of them all. It’s there, once in Deuteronomy and three times in the gospels. “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength.” That’s it. It’s really that simple. And it’s really that hard. It’s simple because what that verse captures so well are the marks of a balanced, faithful, healthy, and truly joyful life. It’s hard because to get to that point where we’re loving God with all our heart and all our soul and with all our mind and with all our strength takes a lifetime (or more?) of diligent, disciplined work. None of us love God that much. As much as we try to sincerely live a good Christian life, none of us are truly “all in.” That’s why this is more of an invitation than it is a commandment – an invitation to go deeper, in each one of those four areas, constantly and regularly throughout the whole course of our lives. That’s why the ancient Israelites felt the need to talk about this verse morning, noon, and night, constantly seeking to apply it in their daily lives, and teaching it to their children. This little verse stands at the bedrock of a balanced, faithful, healthy, and truly joyful life.
I have come to believe that a balanced, faithful, healthy, and truly joyful Christian life involves four key ingredients:
1. Loving the Lord our God with all our heart: the emotional dimension of faithful obedience. God has given each of us a heart. We have been given emotions that can strengthen our life, or cripple it. Whether our lives will be filled with happiness, merriment, peacefulness, calm, centeredness, and love, or instead with anger, bitterness, resentment, jealousy, envy, anxiety, and hate, is – to a very great extent – up to us. All of us experience negative emotions from time to time, some people more so than others. We can all learn better ways to work through our negative emotions so they won’t cripple us or make us miserable to be around. We can seek help from trusted friends or counselors or therapists to learn how to deal effectively with our emotions. We can learn how to respond to situations thoughtfully rather than react to them instinctively. We can learn how to manage our own anxiety. We are called to love God with all our heart, and I hear in that an invitation to take conscious, intentional, deliberate steps to make our heart – our emotions – as healthy as it/they can possibly be.
2. Loving the Lord our God with all our soul: the spiritual dimension of faithful obedience. God has given each of us a soul. We have been given a spiritual life that requires intentional cultivation. From an early age we can experience and appreciate the beauty of God’s creation, but as we grow older we have a multitude of opportunities to deepen and enrich our spiritual lives. Spending time immersing ourselves in the scriptures and engaging in times of prayer and meditation is absolutely central here. As we mature in the faith, the scriptures go from being a book that we have a hard time wrapping our head around to a book that we turn to routinely to give us strength and comfort and direction for the road ahead. As we mature in the faith, we develop the capacity to pray sincerely and joyfully and earnestly, both in our speaking to God and in our listening for God to speak to us. We are called to love God with all our soul, and I hear in that an invitation to take conscious, intentional, deliberate steps to make our soul – our spirituality – as healthy as it can possibly be.
3. Loving the Lord our God with all our mind: the intellectual dimension of faithful obedience. God has given each of us a mind. We have been given an intellect that can be used to strengthen our own life as well as the lives of others. We have been given the ability to reason and think and explore possibilities and learn a huge multitude of things. As T. H. White put it so beautifully in The Once and Future King: “Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the thing for you. Look at what a lot of things there are to learn – pure science, the only purity there is. You can learn astronomy in a lifetime, natural history in three, literature in six. And then, after you have exhausted in milliard lifetimes in biology and medicine and theocriticism and geography and history and economics – why, you can start to make a cartwheel out of the appropriate wood, or spend fifty years learning to begin to learn to beat your adversary at fencing. After that you can start again on mathematics, until it is time to learn to plow. . . .” Science, art, literature, poetry, music, and so much more, are all things we can value. We can develop a greater appreciation for the world and all its beauty. We can learn skills that will better equip us for the living of this life. There should never come a time in life when we stop learning! We are called to love God with all our mind, and I hear in that an invitation to take conscious, intentional, deliberate steps to make our mind – our intellect – as healthy as it can possibly be.
4. Loving the Lord our God with all our strength: the physical dimension of faithful obedience. God has given each of us a body. We have been given a physical form in which to inhabit this world, and God invites us to be good stewards of these bodies. We make a thousand choices every day about what we do with these bodies that God has given us. What do we put into our body? What do we do with our bodies to build them and maintain them so that we will be able to live out as long and full a life as possible, and enable us to joyfully serve others more easily and more productively and for longer periods of time? Often, I find myself disheartened by the growing rate of childhood obesity in this country, or by people whose lives have come to a premature end because of poor choices they made that affected their bodily health, or by people who find themselves burdened with a debilitating condition that could have been avoided had they taken better care of themselves. On the other hand, I find myself greatly heartened by stories of people who have managed to get their alcohol addiction under control, or who have mustered up the strength to stop smoking after many long years, or who develop new exercise or dietary habits that enable them lose weight or gain strength so that they feel like a whole new person. In the past couple months, I’ve been greatly inspired by a very large group of 50+ women who have been walking or jogging at Hawk Island every Saturday morning. For some of them, this is a huge step forward towards a healthier and happier life – way to go, ladies! We are called to love God with all our strength, and I hear in that an invitation to take conscious, intentional, deliberate steps to make our bodies – the physical aspects of our being – as healthy as they can possibly be.
Our hearts, our souls, our minds, our bodies – all of these are gifts that God has given us. All of these aspects of our being can be in a state of good health, or a state of poor health, or somewhere in between. It’s very possible to be reasonably healthy in one dimension and reasonably unhealthy in another. Imagine, for example, a fine teacher with an incredible mind but poor physical health, or imagine a good athlete whose emotional life is in shambles. Both of those people have developed strengths in one of the four dimensions of a balanced, faithful, healthy, and truly joyful life, but both of those people are undoubtedly finding themselves burdened because of a lack of health in some other area of their life. There comes a time in each of our lives when we have to face the hard stuff. There comes a time in our lives when we need to be able to say to ourselves, “Okay, this aspect of my life is out of control – and I need to do something about it.” Sometimes, we put that off. Sometimes, we know what we need to do, but we have a hard time mustering up the courage to actually do it. Other times, we stand in denial of changes we need to make, and so we rob ourselves of a brighter future. Every now and then, somebody takes a step forward, realizing what they need to do, and then mustering up the strength to actually do it. I met a pastor recently who was on the verge of celebrating one year of sobriety, after realizing a year earlier that he needed to join Alcoholics Anonymous. Good for him! When people do things like that – wow. I’ve never yet met anyone who has regretted making significant changes to their life that have resulted in greater health – emotional health, spiritual health, intellectual health, or physical health. These people are able to love life more . . . and they’re able to love God more.
I have come to believe that part of our calling as Christians is to take seriously that invitation to love God with all our heart, and all our soul, and all our mind, and all our strength. I have also come to believe that the more we do that, the more of our “all” that we give, in each of those four dimensions (don’t skip any one of them – all four are critically important!), the more true joy we experience in life. We become able to do that which we love to do and are called to do in this life with more energy and more productivity. We’re more pleasant to be around. And life is just simply more enjoyable.
God doesn’t make these changes in our lives for us. God gives us the ability to make choices, freely, out of our own volition. We can pray to God all we want to make things different about our lives, but we must remember that God gives us freedom to make our own decisions. When we truly listen for God’s voice speaking to us about what we need to do with our lives, and when we actually begin to do those things that God is inviting and beckoning us to do, real changes – positive changes – begin to occur in our lives.
A good way to begin would be to conduct an honest self-assessment. If you were to look at your own life and think about each one of those four dimensions – emotional health, spiritual health, intellectual health, and physical health – which one of those four is the weakest in your life at the present time? Which one of those is most in need of improvement? Perhaps that might be a good place to invest some time and energy. For some people, it might mean taking stock of your physical health and making improvements. For others, it might mean deciding to go back to school or take some classes through community education. For others, it might mean finding a good counselor to help you work through issues in your life that are causing you stress and anxiety. For others, it might mean delving into Bible study or developing a more disciplined prayer life.
You have the power to bring yourself more joy in your life. You have the ability to change many of the circumstances of your life. You have the capacity to grow. You have the possibility of experiencing whole new depths of living that you haven’t experienced yet. Go for it. Take a step in a healthier direction. Work to improve some aspect of your life. Make the change that you’ve known for years you need to make. You’ll find yourself growing in your appreciation for life. You’ll find yourself growing in your love for God. You’ll find yourself thinking, “Gee – I wish I’d done this years ago.” Give yourself the gift that only you can give yourself, the gift that God is inviting you to receive, the gift of a healthier life, a more joyful life.
Trust me. You’ll be glad you did.
Peace and blessings,
Bill
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment