Defining What Matters

There is no such things as a bad time to make serious assessments about the things we take seriously. Life by no means is a joke, and there are things that are certainly not to be taken lightly, however I feel that many people walk and run through life making everything a top priority. If you live a life in which everything is in a tie for first place, I’m going to go ahead and guess that you probably live under an immense amount of pressure, and that much of that pressure is self created. Priorities are the vertical order of importance we use to organize our lives and relationships, time is finite, and typically finite resources have value. Furthermore the more limited or scarce a resource is, the more perceived value we assign to it. The fewer moments we have the more valuable each moment seems. Priorities assign a value hierarchy to our lives and help us define how we will employ our key finite resource time. There of course is a reason we inevitably see a shift in priorities of the way a terminally ill cancer patient prioritizes his time as compared to someone who isn’t forced to face, in a real sense, the fact that we’re all on a countdown to the grave. The perception of value changes when we change the way we view the scarcity of something.

Priorities are a way we communicate with the world around us. The way we establish the ranks and resources of our lives sends a message about who or what is in first place, and the things for which all others fall subordinate. Do we shift our relationships to fit into place around our jobs, or visa versa? Do we value providing for our families over having a fun day out at the beach? What matters more? What matters most?

I think for many of us young folks its so easy to get caught up in the pursuit of a career, establishing life in a marriage relationship, raising a family, whatever. The list of things that fit into our individual priority economies is exhaustive, and no matter how we perceive our “priority lists”, there is undoubtedly much that claws for our attention. But what really matters? We are complicated beings, and the reality is that there probably are infinite number of ways to rationalize any given priority structure.

For example, does a job matter because:

1. it communicates something about social status or value
2. it provides money or a means to provide for life
3. work in and of itself is important
4. people rely on you for your job
5. it enables you to do other things that actually matter more than the job itself

Every facet of our priority systems can fall subject to this line of questioning, and it is important to understand no only where things fall, but why they fall where they do. At the end of the day if you follow the process through to the end, everything you do will communicate something about whatever priority is really number 1 on your list. And number 1 of course communicates a very deep truth about what matters in your life.

I have spent many years of my life focusing on much that simply doesn’t matter. This is incredibly disheartening, because I haven’t been around for that many years. Whether it be pleasure, popularity, success, acknowledgement of my peers, fun, or general advancement in life, I’ve often caught myself prioritizing things that in the grand scheme of things simply DO NOT MATTER. The cultural trophies we have created often become my idols, and often it is because I either take myself or certain things in my life way too seriously.

There is great danger in myopically assessing that which is important, because when we do so our priorities become self motivated and self serving. The human tendency is to have a very narrow focus, and that focus is typically aimed and centered around ourselves…it is a shameful reality, but lets face it even in our most selfless moments we are all very self consumed.

There is only room for one at the top rank on the list of that which we care about in life, and typically there is a battle between Self and God, no two other things are in greater conflict. Self as a top priority may manifest as a job, a family, monetary wealth, or even some philanthropic endeavor, but the reality is that without God as number one, everything we do becomes a means to glorify ourselves. When we put God at the top, we cannot help but to take our work and the things that “matter” to us, and subordinate them to things that truly matter. All things on our priority lists work towards whatever holds the top rank, and when that is God, work, family, money, friends, and the lot all become means make God the top priority. It all becomes ministry, it all is transformed into something infinite, paychecks, board meetings, social gatherings all become a pulpit for God as the end all and be all in our lives. Conversely, when God is absent all works towards the glory of self, and in turn in one way or another we all end up at a point of total despair, total emptiness, or total destruction.

For all practical purposes our priorities are more than a list, they define a singular salient point about our lives. If all else fails, and I am left with nothing else what do I choose?

A prioritization of our lives is a 1 item list that contains multiple sub points, the sub points are the means by which we communicate what is number 1 and why. May God help us if our top priority is anything but him. How hopeless is life if we are given the choice to have one thing and we choose a job…yikes! I am aware that there is an old proverbial saying that warns of putting all your eggs in one basket, but a life for Christ is an all or nothing kind of thing, there is no room for anything but him at the top. There is no way to parcel and compartmentalize our lives to try to find a “happy medium”. In operating in an area of comfortable compromise we slyly rearrange ourselves back to the top spot and simply use God as an means to glorify ourselves.

For me especially, black and white choices are tough, I like to qualify and create contingencies in the event that I change my mind. I prefer to have escape routes and ways to keep my options open. In terms of picking what’s number one however, its an impossibility there just simply isn’t room at the top. Christ throughout his ministry preached this concept and the choice is simple, we may choose life (God) or death (anything else).

So the question remains, what really matters most?

CP

Fans

I am a firm believer that encouragement is one of the single greatest motivators that we as people have and can offer each other. Encouragement is the act of empowering others with hope, it is willing participation in situations and circumstances that we could, for all practical purposes, merely observe. Having fans and being a fan of others builds a bond through true challenges and struggles, and allows our lives to intermingle at times and places where we can cease to understand the circumstances and situations that loom over each other. Encouragement does not necessarily require that we understand or fully grasp the gravity of any particular event or undertaking, but rather it only requires that we make choices to step outside of our own circumstances to acknowledge the gravity and importance of the circumstances of others.

As is the case with any action where we invest time, resources, and emotions, encouragement and the act of encouraging others changes our perspective and produces a state-of-heart that opens the door to allow us to love each other in real and deep ways. When we make choices to cheer and to cheer loudly for people around us we not only plant seeds of hope and optimism in dismal and hopeless times, but we ourselves also will find that the way we view those we encourage also changes. Encouragement facilitates the shift from outcome to input orientation I wrote of a few weeks ago (Input vs. Outcome) and it helps us to love in a non-results-oriented way.

If we encourage only as a function of undertakings and actions that are successful, we aren’t really encouraging at all, we are simply rewarding results that we deem to have merit. By conditioning encouragement on when a particular outcome is achieved we commoditize relationships and we take on the role of fair-weather fans. Who in life needs support and encouragement only when they’re winning? The moments where we are lost, hopeless, and struggling seem to be much better candidates for us as spectators to cheer.

I believe that we all identify with what it means to overcome adversity, so it is no wonder that we cheer for the underdog and we love to hear stories time and again about those who overcome (not necessarily achieve) in spite of enormous obstacles. We all understand what it means to face big challenges, and when we see times and places where darkness does not prevail it resonates deep in our souls and reminds us to keep fighting. The will to overcome is something we all seek but don’t always find in ourselves and others, but when we engage in acts of encouragement we reinforce the fact that above the clouds the sun still shines, and that while times may be hard they too shall pass.

Think for a minute of a proud parent. Whether it’s a finger painting or their child’s first soccer game, it is clear that when you see a parent cheer for a child that their encouragement is a derivative of their love. Even if you have not experienced it in your life first hand, I’m confident you’ve seen it somewhere. Love and encouragement are intertwined, each one invoking the other. The more we love the more we encourage, the more we encourage the more we love…it is a beautiful cycle, and this is the heart of what I am talking about, encouragement is not only a result of love, but it makes love more deep, more real and in turn less performance based (or more unconditional)

By encouraging others we foster a sense of openheartedness to the people who grace our lives on a daily basis. When we cheer, we get in on the race and when it is our time to run, we run well. Encouragement is a great tradition of adversity.

When we are encouraged, we too as the recipients see great benefits and change in our lives. The field which adversity plows gives way for encouragement to plant seeds of hope. While seeds may take time to sprout, and may require replanting, once they are in the soil of our lives, there they stay. If we accept encouragement we become believers in hope, believers in our ability to change, our ability to overcome, our ability to stay the course and carry on when times are hard. And when it is harvest season, we too have seeds that we can plant in others.

I have been afforded many great fans in my life. My parents, my friends, sometimes even total strangers, but all of them cheer me on in some many arenas of my life. For this I am deeply grateful. I have found myself on both sides of the coin, both giving and receiving and I know that my greatest joy is not overcoming adversity, but knowing that there are people sincerely pulling for me in this life. Both those who encourage me and those I encourage inspire me towards greatness, while I have not by any means achieved it and nor may I ever, I know and believe that the hope and love of Christ is both the means and the end of that which I seek. Those who encourage me keep me rooted in this every day, and keep me moving on pushing forward towards Christ.

A life of cheering and being cheered is rich, so I implore you to not only cheer on the races being run around you, but I also cheer you to run well.

"If you're going through hell, keep going" - Winston Churchill

Cheering and being Cheered,
CP

Life on Loan

A few months ago, my Mom said something to me (or about me) that resonated deeply. As a part of a family birthday tradition, my Mother blessed me with some words of encouragement and appreciation.. Basically, what she said is that from a young age, and even when I was still in my Mom’s tummy, they knew I would be special. You see, while I wasn’t a part of my parent’s immediate plans, I was a part of God’s…I was for all intensive purposes a surprise. What she went on to say next, and what I viewed as being so profound was, “…we always viewed Chris as being on loan to us from God.” Maybe I’m prodding too deeply into the circumstances of my seemingly accidental conception, but viewing my life as a precious resource made me consider life on loan, I mean if I’m on loan to my parents…I’m pretty sure I’m on loan to myself too.

A part of me understands more about myself and my life, knowing that I was not the result of my parent’s family plans…but God’s eternal plans. Being “on purpose”, means a lot. Furthermore, being owned and loaned by someone else makes the possessive vocabulary in my life quickly vanish…what is “mine” anyways?

You see, my Mom’s view of me as her child as taught me something about my view of my life here on earth. Not only, is my life on loan to her as my mother, but its on loan to me. I can take no credit for what I am. I certainly had no role in drafting up the blue prints for humanity, and neither did I have a part in writing the script for time and history…all that I have really done is been invited in on the action. God handed each of us life, its his.

Each day provides an interesting intersection of our lives, at the drop of a hat our whole world’s are so easily disrupted, it goes both ways, good and bad. We could fall in love, we could lose a loved one; we could be stricken with terrible disease, or find great fortune. Life is stupidly delicate when you really consider it, which is why “being on loan” is a really profound concept. None of what I have is mine, believing in the sovereignty of God, means that every day, minute, and hour is on loan…it means that our time here is precious, and ultimately will be accounted for. After all, a loan gets repaid.

When something is borrowed and we have proper reverence for the true owner of the borrowed item, a shift occurs in our perception (mine becomes yours). Think for a minute of a teenager who borrows his dad’s sports car. The young driver knows that if he wrecks the car there will be hell to pay. On the other hand, if he is careful with what he’s been given and handles the car knowing he’ll give it back, he’ll get to experience great excitement and joy. Simply being lent a resource will not do, you must actually acknowledge the rightful owner, otherwise there is a detachment which allows self-indulgence and self-absorption to prevail. If things are kept in the proper perspective and we remain cognoscente of the true owner of our lives, our primary preoccupation becomes not that of self gratification but rather good stewardship. We stop trying to exploit that which we have been lent, and we start viewing our lives as an opportunity to enjoy and make good with that which we have been afforded.

Not only are our lives on loan to us, but we’re on loan to each other. The pool of assets which we are lent extends far past our lives in an immediate sense. Time, money, and relationships; all people, places, and things; its all borrowed and when we view it as such we start to become good accountants of it all.

If someone you loved handed you $100 and said, “I want you to use this to show me how you love me.” What would you do? Flowers, an elaborate meal, maybe tickets to a concert…there are a lot of creative options, there are lots of ways to put the money to good use. However, without a relationship with the lender, how could you possibly successfully achieve the objective with the $100? The deeper the love and closer the relationship, the more time and energy we would spend carefully planning out the $100 to the penny. Imagine getting to tell the person the story of how you used the resource they gave you to convey your love “…and then I spent a quarter playing your favorite song on a juke box, because I know how much you love it when people dance.” Its not about money, but think about being loved and loving that way…where we creatively and purposefully seek opportunities to invest and invest everything.

The covenants of our lending agreement with Christ are loose, they give us free reign to use what we have in infinite ways, but to be good stewards we have to be good lovers of God. Its not about being religious, its not about being good, its about being on purpose with how we invest (our purpose is loving Christ and glorifying him).

Christ said that “he who loses his life shall find it, and he who keeps his life shall lose it.” This has nothing to do with being alive or dead, but rather, being on loan. What Christ’s statement reflects, is a life sold out; a life that has handed over the total equity stake. It is the act of taking inventory of our lives and assigning God as the right full owner to it all, and in doing so we are given a piece of life in Christ. This is the deal of the century, we trade the temporary and fleeting elements of life on earth in exchange for a stake in eternity.

Going back to the $100 analogy, think that one day we will be able to give an account for our lives. If we had to hand back our friendships, our careers, our free time, our money, our marriages, our children, our homes, our everything and show how we used it all to creatively express our love for God who lent it all to us, how would we do?

We may come up short on the $100, we may spend it all, but God expects as to use it. When we hand it all back to him, we will not say “Here’s what is yours.” Do you think God needs us to affirm him as the rightful stakeholder in all of time and creation? he doesn’t (reference the parable of the talents). Rather, when we say, “Here is what I’ve done with what you gave me, because I love you.”

If our response to being loved and love itself are the primary motivations for everything we do, how should everything we do change?

Balancing my life “portfolio”,
CP

Input vs. Outcome

Results don’t lie, what a brutal proverb. In this day and age we have a unique ability and a strange obsession with measuring things. Financial results, stock performance, athletic performance, web traffic, school grades…we even measure and rate art (ridiculous). I agree that in many of our personal and professional endeavors, measurement helps us meet targeted objectives and be better at whatever it is we do. Results and measurement are a huge part of what drives our capitalist society (note word choice: society not economy), quantifying financial performance of a company tells us where we should invest, quantifying test scores in school indicates how well we studied. The problem is so much of our western world has become blinded by the quantification of risks and rewards that we threaten to reduce everything spiritual, relational, and personal down to some value oriented equation. We expend tremendous energy assessing where we can extract value from our lives; we calculate our return on investment and adjust our investment strategy accordingly. We are greedy people, me and my generation especially, and our only concern often appears to be maximizing what we GET.

Our measurement or benchmarking culture helps us know where we GET the most. However while results don’t lie, they can deceive.

What we fail to consider is that many of the things that we should be investing in, are very high risk, and often stand to yield no return. You can plug in factors to an equation to try to calculate what it is you can get out of any given relationship or situation, but you’ll get the wrong result every time. If we care at all about each other, and if we care at all about Christ’s work, about loving people, about changing those around us through love, we need to shift focus. We need to rethink the system we use to view the world, to view each other, and to quantify our means to get value out of things…instead of being oriented around the outcome of a situation, we must learn to be input oriented.

Let’s take the example of relationships, when you really weigh the risk/reward of loving someone it simply doesn’t stack up. Love is simply not an equitable transaction, when you consider all that you risk by loving someone it is a truly risky prospect. We make ourselves open to rejection, abuse, disappointment, not to mention a whole myriad of other frightening things that we subjugate ourselves to when we love others. Does being loved in return merit the risk of the endeavor of loving? The answer is, it doesn’t matter. We are to love no matter what, simply and purely, its Biblical, it’s the Jesus model for relationships, it’s a mandate not an option. Love doesn’t fit the equation.

Love, Grace, and the very nature of God are beyond calculation. It is incalculable the measures by which he loves us and the lengths he has gone through to redeem us. I’m pretty sure if we wanted a fair system that added up, we’d all be unfit to be loved, and we’d all be damned. The vast depths of our depravity, can only be overcome by the infinite span of God’s love.

God’s grace and love defy math. We are not loved because of an equation, we are loved because God chooses to love us, its his very nature.

When we shift focus to our input, none of the other stuff matters, performance becomes a moot point…we give God our best, we give him our everything regardless of how that feels…and most importantly regardless of what the outcome might look like. Being input orientated keeps us engaged in the action of giving, its keeps us investing, it invites God into our actions, and asks him to do whatever he ever he wills with whatever parts of our day-to-day lives he wants. While the shift from outcome to input is scary and leaves us constantly uncertain, it properly aligns our definition of value with God’s…that definition is: God defines value, not us. When we embrace this concept, we stop looking for ways to GET the most our of life, and we start looking for ways to GIVE the most.

A tremendous amount of tension is caused by wanting to get something OUT of any particular situation, as opposed to contribute something INto a situation. Next time you are in a meeting or in a group setting (professional or otherwise), pay attention to how much effort and fighting takes place…we fight for attention, we fight to be correct, we fight to be heard, we fight, we fight, we fight. The natural human reaction is to fend for ourselves and to get what is ours…unfortunately it is the American way. When we instead walk into a room giving attention, validating others, listing, giving, giving, giving…our hearts are completely changed and social dynamics are revolutionized.

When you give anything (time, money, love, attention, etc) and you do so willingly, your heart will be changed, by letting go of things and giving them away you contain the natural urge to horde and alleviate the relational stress of the aforementioned struggle of inter-relational combat. Giving means we rewrite the rules, it means we choose to play a different game.

Part of discipleship to Christ means not only do we constantly give, invest, and plant seeds, but it also means we expect nothing. Instead of recognizing only the shining celebrating our successes, the way we live life in community changes, life itself becomes a celebration. We do all we do as an act of love. We go to work, we have community dinners, we are spouses, we are employees, we are friends, we are citizens, we are leaders…we are all we are, and we do all we do because we love God. Outcome becomes irrelevant, instead the input, or what we invest in to people, places, and things in our world becomes an outpouring of love and a constant act of worship. We invest not because it’s safe or because there may be a good return, we invest because we have something to give. We take what God has so graciously given us, and we give it all away.

Our concept of failure transforms.

A while back one of my roommates and I wanted to lay low for an evening, and watch a movie. We were hoping for something mindless and lighthearted, so we picked up Disney’s “Meet the Robinsons”. As the movie credits rolled we turned to each other with drop-jawed expressions, astonished at the depth, and spiritual magnitude of the message of the movie. One scene in particular made me well up with emotion. The story is about a struggling young inventor who also happens to be an orphan. Through a series of events, the main character ends up in the future with an eccentric family who welcomes him into their home…

As the family sits down for dinner, one of the futuristic gadgets, a peanut butter and jelly making machine malfunctions, and the young inventor is asked to help save the day. The family watches anxiously as the young boy tampers and tweaks with the machine. As he pulls the trigger to test his work, what happens? TOTAL FAILURE, peanut butter and jelly go flying, total disaster.

The family sits quietly for a moment, and as the awkward silence builds, they erupt into cheers for their young inventor, proclaiming “What a glorious failure!!!”

When we change our focus to what we contribute into a situation, we live life on the edge. We go all in on life, we play with the chips on the table, cards up, it is risky as hell sometimes but the best we can do is try our best. I know this sounds like something you’d hear from a little league coach, but it’s so true. Sometimes we have glorious failures, but God works in our moments of triumph and tragedy.

The scariest thing in life isn’t failing, its giving it your best. Being completely sold out, diving in head first, holding nothing back…that is scary. When we love Christ and we love each other we must be in the act of celebrating the effort (the input), the act of risking failure, the act of being sold out, not the act accomplishment (what is accomplishment anyways?). When we do so grace abounds, and we love at all costs, not just when the costs the make sense.

Add it up,
CP