What God Wants For Your Life

Have you ever watched the television series Cold Case? I did for a while. If you like police shows, it can be intriguing. Unearthing long abandoned investigations, Lilly Rush of the Philadelphia PD discovers new leads, shakes down old witnesses, and arrests the person who really did the crime — all with a faintly tragic air. The main characters are always middle aged or older, with receding hairlines and well-rounded bodies. And there are wistful flashbacks to sepia toned images of proms populated by teenagers with raging hormones and secret animosities that almost always lead to murder.

But after a while, I thought it also got a bit old (no pun intended). Every episode has an overwrought air of hand-wringing nostalgia to it as — more often than not — old baby boomers revisit their youth. And one gets the sense that they are burdened by the past and, for all practical purposes, live there —- shouldering guilt and regret — living with the burden of murder, mayhem, jealousy, hatred, dark secrets, and the memory of having worn mini-skirts and bell bottom slacks.

Woulda, coulda, shoulda….how often have you used those words? Thought them? Lived them? How many of you are using them right now — tuned into the past, or the future. Anywhere but here — Anywhere but now.

My guess is…more than we would like to admit.

For example, some of us are the compulsive planners, forever weighing the contingencies. We sit in church and work on our plans for Sunday lunch, on Monday we will be planning for what we will be doing on Friday, or today we will work on what we are going to do if and when we retire. Others are like me — the king of the post mortem — forever reviewing the way we did things, sure that it should have been done differently. Did we hire the right lawn service, buy the right car, schedule the best vacation? Others are filled with guilt — sure that they have done the wrong thing, mortally afraid that if they haven’t, they will — soon.

Woulda, coulda, shoulda sounds like a joke, but it actually frames the place where many of us live:

• Woulda….What I didn’t do that might have made a difference
• Coulda….What I didn’t do that I know would have made a difference
• Shoulda…What I was morally obligated to do that I didn’t do

What do all three mindsets have in common?

They are all things that were never done and never will be done. They all three traffic in fear, guilt, regret, self-doubt, and insecurity. And all three are thieves….if you live in the past or the future, you will never live in the present. And the present is all you ever have had, do have, or ever will have. The writer of Ecclesiastes understood this….All is vanity. Life passes us by. Jesus understood this…”The rich man said, I know what I will do, I’ll build barns…”

Now on one level, our mothers have all warned us about this at one point or another. So most of us from time to time remember what our mothers told us and we try to focus: “Wow, I didn’t hear what was just said.” “When did the kids grow up?” “Has she already had her first birthday?”

What we are less aware of — and the thing that most of our mothers probably didn’t tell us — is that this is a spiritual issue as well. On that, more tomorrow. But today, where do you live? In the present — or somewhere in the past or future?

Singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen told an interviewer in 1998 that his creative process is “…like a bear stumbling into a beehive or a honey cache: I’m stumbling right into it and getting stuck, and it’s delicious and it’s horrible and I’m in it and it’s not very graceful and it’s very awkward and it’s very painful and yet there’s something inevitable about it.”

What a great description of living into our life’s calling. If you know that God has given it to you, don’t be embarrassed and don’t let fear hold you back. Stumble, get stuck, get sticky…stumble like a bear.

I am not a great fan of Paul Tillich’s theology. It is not that I don’t believe that theology needs to be put in modern vernacular, nor is the problem that Tillich expands on the core theology you can find in the Old and New Testaments.

The problem, it seems to me, is that there is in the final analysis so little in Tillich that resonates in any way with the language of Scripture once you really discover what he means by the words he uses. That is the problem, I assume, that one witty student was referring to when on the wall at St. John’s University, he (or she) scrawled:

And Jesus asked the disciples, “Who do you say that I am?”

And Peter responded, “You are the ground of our being, the eschatological telos of history.”

To which Jesus responded, “What????”

That said, Tillich does get some things right and one of the things he was particularly good at was framing questions. In one place, he argues that “Every serious thinker must ask and answer three fundamental questions:

(1) What is wrong with us?

(2) What would we be like if we were whole, healed?

(3) How do we move from our condition of brokenness to wholeness?

Answer those questions and you might get a new life.

From time to time most people have lived with Lilliputians…little people who are bent on keeping others small. You may have met them at church. You may live with a Lilliputian. You may work with one.

They are the people who always insist on being right, or on being the brightest bulb on the tree. They have a deft way of reminding others how they have failed — no matter how much good they may have done. They are better at picking things apart than they are at building them and they are usually skillful with a cutting word — because it takes a lot of cutting to get people down to your level when you are a Lilliputian.

When you live with Lilliputians, the danger is that their mean-spirited way of being will feed your own dark spirit. Gulliver must have really winged at being tied down by thousands of little ropes.

So, it is important to remember the spiritual issues at stake:

Lilliputians are usually insecure.

They control, niggle, criticize, and find-fault as a means of deflecting attention from their own shortcomings.

They need healing. They should search for it. And there may not be anything you can do to contribute to their quest.

But you can resist returning their behavior in kind.

I once talked to a friend about the vicious scape-goating to which he exposed by the Lilliputian to whom he reported.

“How do you stand it?” I asked.

My friend answered, “He is sick, so I am sick.”

Liiliputians spread bitterness, in-fighting, and invective.

Remember you are loved.

Remember that God gave you the gifts that you possess.

Remember that in returning invective for invective you are made small.

If necessary, move on.

But whatever you do, don’t let the little people get you down.

It is easy to think of the spiritual life as one dominated by a series of problems that are confronted, conquered, and forever vanquished. But life is more like a play. There are a handful of leading personalities that are there from beginning to end and only the bit-players come and go.

So it is with the spiritual life. A hundred and one temptations come and go —- like spiritual spam:

“Help, I’m being held hostage by Russian gangsters.”

“Quick send your banking information, I have money to give you.”

“Hi, my name is Kitten…”

But the ones that lie closer to the defining struggles of our lives go around and come around…

“I could never please you…”

“You never loved me…”

“I never heard you say I am proud of you…”

“You are a disappointment…”

“You are ugly…”

“You can’t succeed…”

“You aren’t good….”

“You are stupid…”

Those earliest messages never go away and, sadly, in an effort to exorcise them, we draw people into our lives over and over again who will tell us the same stories that we heard when we were small. They are familiar, so they feel right. They cut us, so we try to conquer them.

But they don’t go away. What goes around, comes around.

Still…there is hope.

Name the wound.

Name the way in which it controls you.

Ask Jesus for freedom from it.

Live into the freedom you are given.

What goes around will come around. But it won’t come around as often and it won’t have as much influence as it did the last time.

Writing some years ago about finding the will of God, I made some fairly direct statements about the danger of relying too heavily on signs and wonders. Some people wondered if I really believed that God works in our world.

I do. What I don’t believe is that just because something unusual happens it necessarily tells me much about the will of God.

For example, today I climbed onto an airplane. Now normally what you find in the seat pocket includes a publication on the safety features of the plan, the airline magazine, and a Skymall Catalogue. The only thing that changes is the accumulation of garbage from the previous flight — plastic bags, French fry containers, hamburger wrappers, and discarded gum wrappers.

But today someone left behind a copy of The Robb Report, a magazine devoted to tracking the top ten toys of the year. Wrist watches for $90,000, $5000 cigars, and the latest four door Bentley. What I cannot and do not conclude from this unusual bit occurrence is that God wants me to buy some or all of what is in this magazine. Determining the will of God involves asking important questions:

What does God value?

What is the work of God?

What does the work of God say about the purpose of my life?

Where and how has God been moving in the world around me, in my life?

What choices will draw me closer to God and to others?

What choices will align my life with the movement of God in the world around me?

Questions of that kind help me to triage the events in my life.

Some choices contribute in an active fashion to the work of God in my life. Some do not. Others are neutral. And some choices are just exotic things I can’t afford.

Why does it make a difference to be there?

It isn’t you. It’s Jesus.

I’m Jesus??

No, but when you care enough to be there for someone, Jesus uses your love to mediate His love.

And if I don’t believe in Jesus?

That doesn’t matter. (Well, it does, but that’s a different subject.) We aren’t talking about what you believe. We are talking about how the world is made.

Huh?

The world was made by a God who was willing to assume our form, walk our path, bear our burden. So it’s a world where “being there” for someone else makes all the difference. You can sense the larger love that someone being there represents, whether you believe it or not.

Finally, remember, in the end what we need is God. Our in-need lives begin and end with God.

I was asked once, what is the goal of the spiritual life and what does that goal have to do with the variety of other things people describe as goals of a spiritual pilgrimage. This is the way I responded:

The two words that have become an ever more important part of my vocabulary and that summarize the goal of the spiritual life as I understand it are the words, theosis and ascent. Found broadly throughout the Christian tradition, the sources that come to mind for the former are:

St. Athanasius of Alexandria: “”The Son of God became man, that we might become god.”

And the second of the Petrine epistles (2 Pe 1:4): we have become “partakers of divine nature.”

The source for the latter image (also widely used in the Christian tradition) is found in the work of St. Bernard of Clairvaux, whose work is described by Richard Foster and Garle Beebe as “the desire for God and the ascent of pure love.”

What I like about both descriptions of the spiritual life is the way in which they assume, if not require “imitating Christ, doing God’s will, loving others, [and] responding to the Spirit.” None of these, it seems to me, are ends in themselves, any more than are other goals identified by other spiritual traditions, including for example, centering, balance, integration, peace, or wisdom.

As a Christian this approach defines the spiritual life in explicitly Christian categories, but it does not exclude the several faces of Christian spiritual practice. They are, instead, steps to the same goal.

We are people in need. Born to share in the life of God, we wait to share more fully in the life of God. We are in-need, but we are not without hope. The One who sent us on this journey waits for us and knows our needs.