What God Wants For Your Life

The more we become our best selves, the more we drop personas that we use to hide our true selves.  The more we are our true selves, the scarier life gets.  Why?  Because the personas — the projected selves we use are designed to protect ourselves — and as we shed them, we sense our vulnerability.

To some extent, personas are a necessary part of life.

Not everyone can be trusted with our true selves.  People who are scheming and manipulative can be counted on to take advantage of our vulnerability.

Other personas help us to identify ourselves to one another…the teacher, police officer, physician, nurse, and plumber (as well as hundreds of others) are known by their professional personas.  Those labels allow us to aid one another with confidence and reduces the time it takes to find the person trained to do certain kinds of work.

But there are times when personas can keep us from getting real. We hide behind them in order to insure that we are loved or respected.  The sad irony is that when we do we insure that we are never loved for who we are.

Then it’s time to get real and that is when becoming our best selves gets scary.

When it does, remember these things:

Getting real is the only way to give love and be loved.

The love we give and receive is grounded in God’s love.  It is not finally dependent on the love that other people have for us.

And on the other side of the scary stuff lies the freedom to live the life you were given to live.

My wife and I walked past an eager beagle, anxious to jump up in a Jeep Wrangler, but clearly uncertain his legs would take him there.  He seemed to be saying, “The spirit is willing, but are my legs long enough?”

As the owners of a Gordon Setter whose legs are long enough, but who has no desire to ride in a car, we were impressed with the beagle’s willingness.  Picking up a 78 pound Gordon and hauling her into a car is no simple feat!

Much of the health and wealth gospel trades in ridiculous promises that suggest that the only difference in the stature of a beagle and a Gordon has to do with faith.

The net result is borrowed guilt and embarrassment at having Gordon length legs.

The reality, of course, is far more complicated.  You can have the legs of a Gordon, but if you don’t have the faith that the car ride will be a good thing, you will balk.  If you are an eager beagle, but you have four short legs, all the willingness in the world will not change matters.  And in between there is an endless variation in faith and legs.

The Christian faith is incarnational.  We are asked to believe, dare, act with courage — but we are flesh and bone, tall and short.  God does not expect you to ignore those constraints.

Have faith, honor your limitations, know that God loves you.

Something my friends in recovery have taught me is the absolute necessity of choice: The decision to choose sobriety is the linchpin of those who are recovering alcoholics.

You have to choose sobriety.  No one can choose it for you.  No one should aid and abet your alcoholism.  No one can underwrite it, endorse it, fund it, or clean up behind it.

My wife and I spent a wonderful time in Vancouver not long ago.  The Canadians have an extraordinarily generous social system.  Some would say ruinous — but the politics of it is not my point.

What struck me forcibly is that the system doesn’t keep people from living on the streets — some of them obviously in drug induced states.  What is the problem here? The system is co-dependent with the addicts on the street.

What is the spiritual lesson here?  The same one that is thread through Scripture:  “Choose you, this day, whom you will serve…”  “Whosoever will….”

If you want a life grounded in God, a life with a bit less chaos, a life with spiritual focus, then you need to choose it.

Stop making excuses.

Stop rehearsing the past.

Stop waiting for some one to bail you out.

It’s not going to happen.

It wouldn’t make a lasting difference if it did.

You need to choose.

What follows may not be easy.  But it will yield to your choice.

Not everything that defeats us is a sin. Not in the way we typically think of sin at any rate: a willful disregard for the will of God.
Some of what slows and inhibits our spiritual growth is deeply rooted in experiences that obscure the freedom we were meant to enjoy. The way we were reared, the family dynamics that shaped the way we are in the world.

The challenge is remembering that our lives are an integrated whole. We are not simply souls, but emotions, bodies, life histories. To find healing it is important to know this. Otherwise, we run the risk of being defeated by forces and patterns in our lives that we do not recognize as having a fundamentally spiritual dimension.

For example, a life long desire to be loved and honored by someone who owed us love and respect may make us brittle, dependent, grasping, desperate, or angry. Any of those feelings can inhibit the growth of freedom in our lives.
Find a place to tell God your story, open the whole of it to healing, and find the God-given freedom out of which you were intended to live.

One writer notes that at West Point they teach students that all successful military campaigns depend upon “command intent” — the goal toward which an army’s efforts are finally directed, the one thing they are fighting to achieve.

Battle plans are fine, they observe, but after the first shot is fired, such plans are either greatly modified or abandoned.

The same is true of our spiritual lives. We may make any number of plans, but if we are not guided by a command intent, it is almost impossible to stay centered.

Far too often our spiritual well being is deeply tied to what we have planned. So, when illness, unemployment, loss, or simply a different sequence of events intervenes, many of us are “undone” by the vagaries of life.

That’s when it is important to live by a command intent: I will seek intimacy with Jesus and walk with him, come what may.

My evangelical friends say that when God closes one door, he opens another. My Catholic friends say that when God closes a door, Mary kicks out a window. Another friend observes, “It is what it is.” And not long ago, I heard another person say that when God closes one door, he opens another, but it’s hell in the hallways.

It’s important to know what you think God does, or doesn’t do. Some people trade a God that they can worship for a sense of security, attributing things to God that make them feel better about where they are, but which imply that God does things for which we would imprison or institutionalize a human being.

That’s a high price to pay for security. And what always worries me about that kind of thinking is that sooner or later, people who attribute evil to God will come to hate God as well. It can be hard to rethink God once a set of concepts have shaped what you believe.

I don’t believe that God inflicts us or does us harm. I do believe that come what may, God is with us.

The apostle Paul was a veteran of closing and opening doors and, in another, era might have described his own life as a revolving door. But he was clear about one thing: in good and bad times, he belonged to Jesus. And that, it seems to me, is the only place to stand.

In and out of doors — or even in the hell of hallways — Jesus is with us.

What happens when we are here and now, for God?

Third, when you are present to God you will live with freedom.

How many of us journey well into adulthood wrestling with a desire to be loved and accepted? Free to live courageously into the people we were born to be? Secure in our gifts? At peace?

All of us, I suspect. We are waiting for someone to give us permission, someone to love us, someone to say I honor you, adore you, love you.

When that doesn’t happen, we often assume that it doesn’t because somehow God refuses to do it. As real as that conviction may seem, however, nothing could be further from truth.

God loves us in order to give life back to us. If we miss that gift, if we give ourselves to obsessions that rob us of life in the present — it won’t be because God did not want to give us life. It will because we were not alive enough to God in the present to receive what God wanted to give us.

I often find myself imagining the number of times we have stood before Jesus with our hands too full to receive life, protesting, “But Lord, I have my bitterness, my anger, my shame, my fear, my guilt. I don’t have hands that are free enough to receive the gift of new life.” And Jesus, responds, “Put them down. Put down the ugly, limiting, death-dealing emotions and future expecations that trap you and own you — and open your hands.”

You may feel that there is too much history for you to be free of the past. You may say that the future is too complicated and scary for you to live with freedom in the present. But the truth is, if it is God whose reading of our lives finally matters, then there is never so much history that we cannot turn to God, the future is never so complicated that we cannot be present to God. The cold cases, the barns, the woulda-coulda-shoulda do not need to pronounce a verdict on our lives. All we need to say is…

“I am here, I am yours, my hands are free.”

What happens when we are here and now, for God?

The second thing that happens when you are present to God is that your perspective changes.

The world of woulda-coulda-shoulda is a series of lies: The lie that we can control life’s outcome. The lie that all there is tomorrow. The lie that yesterday will never go away and we can’t be forgiven. When you believe those lies you live in the past or the future, but you never live in the present and you never find grace.

The devil will tell you anything to keep you from being present to God, because in the present you will learn that God loves you better than you love yourself. In the present you will learn that grace and forgiveness erases the past and rewrites the future. An alcoholic finds forgiveness for the past, gives himself to God, climbs out of the bottle that controls his life, and lives to be there for his family. A mother surrenders her shame, finds God’s forgiveness for her own past, and avoids projecting that shame on her daughter. A father finds a way to forgive his father for the past and frees his children from yet another cycle of violence because he discovers that he doesn’t need to punish his sons for the anger he feels about the way he was raised. Shed your fears about the future, trust God, and you give your children a world view marked by abundance and generosity, instead of fear and grasping.

Life isn’t always simple. The average black and white photo is filled with shades of gray that don’t catch our eye. But it’s the contrasts that make the images standout. When we give ourselves to God a handful of things change and a different picture emerges — a picture marked by hope.

What happens when we are here and now, for God?

First, your life opens to God.

I love it when people say that they don’t worship anything. Really? The people I know who don’t worship anything always worship something. They just aren’t aware of it and what they usually worship doesn’t merit that kind of devotion. Worship doesn’t consist of just overtly religious activity, it comes from Middle English and it refers to anything you reverence or respect with a life-defining devotion.

Some people are enthralled to something in their past. Their hair, their high school football record, the professional plans they made that did or didn’t materialize, or the relationships that they wanted that did or did not work out. They live in the past, they are trapped by the past, and it often won’t let go of their present. In the recent economic downturn I have found myself counseling an ever larger number of people who are trapped by grief over the worlds they had devoted themselves to that are dead and gone. Companies that they thought would be there forever; work worlds that have shrunk or disappeared. Other people devote their lives to the future that may or may not ever materialize: a 401 K, retirement, a home in Florida, (or if you live in Texas) a home in Montana.

Even the people who aren’t living in the past or the future are usually not really here, even if they are in the now. They are on their phones, instant messaging people who aren’t here but somewhere else in another time zone or following someone else’s life — Lady Gaga, Lindsay Lohan, or someone else who is famous for being well publicized.

What is interesting about people who find something other than God to worship is that they rarely make a difference or if they do, they make a difference because they are obsessed in some way. I was listening to a special the other night about Ted Williams who became a famous baseball player, then became a famous baseball playing wartime pilot, and then became famous for being cryogenically frozen when he died. But it’s difficult to know what a difference that made to the world.

On the other hand, think of Mother Theresa, Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu, Thomas More, Martin Luther King, and a long list of other people —- what do they have in common? They know God and God knows them and that knowledge took them into the world in a way that changed their world.

As important as it is to be responsible, do you know anybody who made a difference in the lives of other people because they planned for retirement, carried a burden of guilt through their lives, worried about the future, or fretted over the past? I doubt it. But those are the gods that a lot of us serve by living in the world of woulda-coulda-shoulda.

Ask God to be present with you now and everything changes. If not in a history-making way, it may be in a way that touches those you love: A child that registers your love; someone you care enough to mentor; someone struggling that you encourage.

Yesterday I said that living in the world of woulda-coulda-shoulda is a spiritual issue. Why?

Live in the past, live in the future, and you will never live for God. After I pay for the house, I will pay attention to my prayer life. After I raise the children, I will pay attention to my spiritual growth. After I retire, I will seek spiritual freedom.

That’s the problem with the rich man. The problem isn’t that he has things or that he owns stuff. The problem isn’t that he has plans build a barn to hold his stuff. The problem is that he is so preoccupied with getting, keeping, and preserving what he has that he isn’t present to God at all. He is living without an awareness of God’s presence.

That’s the difference between the teaching of Jesus and Zen Buddhism. The Gospel story isn’t just about being present; and it isn’t about self-mastery. This isn’t about carpe diem — “seize the day, boys, seize the day.” It’s not even about mortality or judgment. It’s about being here and now for God, with God, and aware of God.

What happens when we do that? Three things. The first tomorrow.