What God Wants For Your Life

So, what do we do with our needs?

First, acknowledge them. God cannot meet needs that you won’t acknowledge.

If you don’t think you have needs, God can’t help you. Why would he? No point in trying to help a minor deity think he is THE DEITY. Better to let the guy go on thumping his chest until he hits a brick wall. God isn’t into forcing himself on people who are pretty sure the moon and stars revolve around them. God isn’t being mean in that case, just open to your choices –- no matter how self-destructive or deluded they may be.

And God can’t help you with needs you won’t acknowledge. Your needs will sit there shaping the course of your life.

Folks in recovery know this to be a fact. Every meeting begins with the declaration, “Hi, I’m Harry, Mary, whoever —- and I am an alcoholic.”

Now, somewhere along the line, we came to the collective, unspoken, erroneous conclusion that at least a few of the people I described yesterday are the world’s true saints.

Maybe not the ones who don’t think they have needs — the islands and continents of self-sufficiency. We are pretty sure that they are on a power trip. Like Daddy Warbucks, they aren’t nice to people on the way up because they don’t plan to come back down.

But somewhere in the remaining categories I described yesterday, a lot of us are convinced we can find the truly noble souls — the people who never admitted to their needs, or sought to address them.

If you’ve been sitting on your needs for 10, 20, 30, or 40 years and you’ve been taking consolation in the sneaking suspicion that you are God’s special gift to the world (or at least an over-bearing spouse and six selfish children) sorry — not true. You are co-dependent, conflict averse, or you are keeping score — but you are not a saint. Not for that reason anyway.

Remember what I said about the way that God made us?

He made us with needs — a need for God, a need for one another, a need for lots of other things and experiences. Things and experiences that give us strength to live another day, re-populate the world, expand our minds, enlarge our hearts, nurture our souls, enrich our lives, and give, as well as receive love.

When we live like islands or we refuse to acknowledge our needs things almost always go wrong spiritually:

We make ourselves into gods.

We make other people our gods.

We live lives that are narrow and dry.

We are filled with secret bitterness and regret over needs denied.

Or…

Our needs come back to bite us (right where you think they would) and we act up in misdirected ways to meet the needs we refused to acknowledge.

That’s not the price of sainthood. That’s the price of failing to own our in-need humanity — which is, I will say it again, God’s gift.

So what do we do with our needs? More tomorrow.

Yesterday I said we all have needs.

There are, however, people who don’t think they have needs.

Some of them are islands — even continents — to themselves. (Or so they think.) Self-sufficient, all-knowing, sovereign —- and in denial.

These are people who have never stopped to acknowledge the God who gave them life, the mother have gave them birth, the parents who clothed and sheltered them, the farmers who grow the food they eat, the people who wired their homes, installed the plumbing, invented the electric light bulb, air conditioned their offices (or in the case of Dallas, an entire city), developed systems to ferry water to their bathroom —- I could go on and on and on, but you get the point. The person who has no needs is clueless and, if not clueless, willfully, arrogantly out of touch with reality.
There are other people who won’t acknowledge their needs.

Some of them are embarrassed to find out that they have them. They are convinced that it makes them inferior. These are people who are convinced that life is a contest.

Some of them think that they are wrong to have needs. These are the people who think that the beauty of God’s creation in all of its manifestations is one giant test designed to demonstrate how sinful they are. They don’t smoke, drink, eat, or make love. They live a parsimonious, low-fat, turkey-and-soybeans-can-be-made-into-anything life.

Some don’t think they deserve to have needs. Who are they, anyway? Typically, they are married to people who are clear about their needs. They work for institutions that have a long list of needs. And they are constantly asking, “Isn’t there someone with bigger needs? Wasn’t there someone already in line?” Generally speaking, these poor folks are so co-dependent, they could walk past a fireplug and wonder how much pain it must experience.

Others won’t acknowledge their needs because they are conflict averse. Perennial peacekeepers, they mistake the absence of conflict for healthy relationships. All they are sure of is that to say, “I have a need,” will start a debate that will embroil them in conflict and they just can’t stand it. So they live in relationships where someone else makes all the really decisive decisions. Those folks, like the last group, are usually co-dependent and, more often, than not, they carry both crosses.

As my spiritual director once told me, “They need to get off the cross. We need the firewood.”

Why this is a spiritual problem tomorrow….

I love people, of all sizes and shapes, in all kinds of states. So, in counseling sessions I would rarely say something this blunt.

(Ok, now and then I have.)

But I am not sitting across from anyone. I don’t have anyone in particular in mind (much). And blogs are a good place to say some things that cannot be easily said in one-on-one encounters.

If the next day or two lodges sideways in someone’s life out there, well “Let the one with ears hear.” This could be a good thing, if you let your temperature and your blood pressure drop a few notches before you email Al Gore to complain about what’s happening on his internet.

One of those topics — and it is probably among the top ten human struggles — revolves around the subject of NEED. So it will take a few days to unpack.

First: we all have needs. We were born with needs. We were made incomplete. And, frankly, I think that God made us that way intentionally.

God is not nearly as interested in our being supremely successful islands of achievement, as God is interested in us being in loving relationship — with God and with one another. In fact, he has made the whole island thing pretty much impossible. (On that, more tomorrow.)

That is why all of life’s most profound spiritual challenges revolve around broken relationships and the need to restore them. God is not interested in wacking you for the sake of wacking you. God does not morph into the angry-I-could-care-less-about-you-God because you have broken a rule. In fact, God does not morph into another kind of God at all. We screw up. God wants to love us and if the stuff we do becomes a problem, it is always about the obstacles it creates for love and relationship.

So needs are what you have and in-need is what you are.

You can’t fill out an application for a need-free life. You can’t live effectively into what God wants for you without facing your needs. And you will not get off this rock without continuing to have needs. In fact, if you are “lucky” you will find yourself faced with a set of needs that looks a lot more like its needy beginning than the middle of it during which you pretended you didn’t have needs.

Why?

Because there is a God, and you are not God.

Because God is love and God can’t help but look for opportunities to love.

And because you are that opportunity.

That’s not bad news. That’s Good News.

And you are blessed.

Some years ago a project was launched at the University of Chicago to define fundamentalism. The scholars who put the project together had varying success and some argued that fundamentalism varies in character far too widely to be described.

At its broadest, however, all forms of fundamentalism share the same longing for certainty.

In that form, there are multiple fundamentalisms: fundamentalisms of the left and the right; religious fundamentalists; political fundamentalists; economic fundamentalists; social fundamentalists; ethical fundamentalists — the list can be expanded endlessly.

In many cases, most if not all fundamentalisms enshrine noble ideas. But the operative word in that description is “enshrine.”

Every fundamentalism fails — not because it declares faith in something, not because it believes passionately in something — but because it makes a God of something that is not God.

For that same reason, however, most critiques of fundamentalism also fail — because they enshrine cynicism, doubt, and smug detachment.
The only thing that deserves to be enshrined is that which deserves to be worshiped.

From beginning to end, life often fails to go the way we planned.

The school we hope to attend says “no.” The employer we seek says “thanks, but no.” The marketplace or world in which we hoped to work so completely changes that our plans don’t get off the ground. Illness strikes and we find ourselves sidelined, leaving us to wonder, “What next?”

Most of us react by trying to plan for the contingencies or we get a new plan. Both might be reasonable choices. And the disappointment that follows is understandable.

But the only secure and spiritual choice is to focus on the “who” of what we believe we are called to become. There is, in our relationship with God, a place that is beyond assault; a constellation of commitments, a way of being that shapes how we respond to the events of life that transcends the events themselves.

Stories of spiritual greatness are rarely, if ever, stories about people for whom everything went as planned. Stories of spiritual greatness are typically stories of people who transcended the events of their lives.

One of my brother’s friends has three dogs. All three are about the same size, but they are very different in temperament and their approach to life. That is always evident when Bob, their owner, takes his dogs to Sonic for ice cream. All three are filled with anticipation and crowd into the Honda Element for their ice cream trip.

But, according to Bob, they are very different to their approach to eating the ice cream.

One of them savors it. There is no one who eats ice cream more slowly, nor with more obvious enjoyment.

Another eats his ice cream with an eye to potential predators. Ever fearful and plagued by a world view predicated on scarcity, he is constantly afraid that someone else will take his ice cream away from him.

The third dog consumes his ice cream in one or two gulps and then attempts to take more ice cream from the other two.

What kind of Sonic Dog are you?

Is the world a place of abundance to be enjoyed?

A place of scarcity to be navigated in fear?

A place to be plundered at the expense of others?

How we live in the world says a great deal about our spiritual state and you can learn a lot about yourself watching dogs eat ice cream at Sonic.

Today’s Wall Street Journal announced a new disorder — the selective eating disorder. Meaning that people who grew up on chicken fingers and French fries might not be able to eat anything but chicken fingers and French fries.

Not able or not willing?

In the on-going “therapeutization” of human behavior, there are times when it is difficult to believe that anything remains our spiritual and moral responsibility. We are what we are. It’s unavoidable. And if someone ties those behaviors to some overt risk — to ourselves or to others, then it’s a disorder, it’s not a matter of choice.

I believe in therapy. I think it can make a difference. And almost everyone at some point in their lives could benefit from it. And there are real disorders.

But to label everything a disorder robs us of the responsibility to make healthy, moral, life-giving decisions. “Robs us?” Yes, “robs us.”

Robs us of the opportunity to take charge of our lives. Robs us of the opportunity to change, to grow, to improve, to live into all that God intends for us.
Robs us of our independence.
Robs us of a sense of initiative.

Making everything a disorder also turns us into dependents waiting for permission or pills to live the lives that are already possible — if we are willing (not able) to choose.

Shirley S. Wang, “Picky Eating Knows No Age Limit,” The Wall Street Journal (Tuesday, July 6, 2010): D1-2.

One of my students posted a badge on her Facebook account not long ago that read…”Nerds? We prefer the term ‘Intellectual Badass.’”

I like that.

But it also illustrates the problem with labels.

Labels almost never describe everything that someone thinks. By definition they give the one labeled no opportunity to explain, nuance, or defend what they believe. The labels themselves slip and slide in meaning, changing connotation. And the connotation that matters is almost always the one used by the one doing the labeling.

“Conservative,” for example, once meant “conserving” of the best of tradition. Now, more often than not, it refers to a body of beliefs (though, predictably, that body of beliefs varies widely.)

“Liberal,” once meant, open to ideas. Now it describes someone who doesn’t believe what a conservative believes (and that is hardly a matter of being open).

It is not surprising, then, that when labels are used conversation ends. If I label you, then I no longer need to make the effort to understand you — your fears, concerns, or passions. I have decided whether you are right or wrong, acceptable or unacceptable, in or out.

That is not to say that you shouldn’t form or hold critical opinions, but labeling doesn’t make for critical conversations. It forecloses on them.

What is the spiritual issue at stake? We are called to love God and love one another. You can’t love a label.

George Weigel observes:

“the deepest currents of history are spiritual and cultural, rather than political and economic…history is not simply the by-product of the contest for power in the world — although power plays an important role…And history is certainly not the exhaust fumes produced by the means of production, as the Marxists taught. Rather, history is driven, over the long haul, by culture — sby what men and women honor, cherish, worship; by what societies deem to be true and good and noble; by the expressions they give to those convictions in language, literature, and the arts; by what individuals and societies are willing to stake their lives on.”

In other words, regardless of how you understand it or express it — whether you even acknowledge it or not — our national fortunes depend upon the spiritual choices we make. Staying alive to those choices and making them with courage are the measure of a nation’s place in history.

Happy Fourth…

George Weigel, The Cube and the Cathedral, Europe, America, and Politics without God (New York: Basic Books, 2005): 30.