As always, JD was gracious enough to comment on my recent post and he made a good point. So, just to recap, our excitement in following God has more of an influence on our world than any of our clever arguments or slogans BUT, and this was JD's point, being and staying excited on a day-to-day basis is "freakn' hard sometimes dude!" (that's not a quote from JD but that's how I imagine him saying it if he were here right now :-) Oh how true that is JD, I, for example, had a rotten day last Thursday (I mean it was not very good at all) but the next day I was on top of the world (partially because it was friday). So perhaps complete and total on-top-of-the-worldness is a little hard every single day of our lives but its also equally true that, with a more disciplined thinking on the matter, it can less the exception and more the rule of our lives. And that is what God always intended.
To many people, the words "excitement" and "discipline" probably don't seem like they go together very well. In our minds we might think that discipline is required for running or dieting or driving less than 70 mph on the way to work. But discipline can be applied to the emotional aspects of our lives as well. Looking a little closer, the discipline of excitement involves a combination of the heart and the eyes. It is concerned with how you choose to see life and how you choose to feel about life - the operative word being "choose". And that so-called choosing is done with our mind. So if you think of your heart and eyes as a ship, let's call it the USS Attitude (it's cheesy, I know), then your mind would be the rudder. So oftentimes, in situations that we may classify as less than desirable, our natural inclination is to plot a pessimistic course for our heart and our mind to follow that does little to remedy anything.
Some people might tend to think that what I just described is not disciplined excitement or joy but just simply wishful thinking - that is not the case. Disciplined excitement or joy is different from denial because it can recognize a crap situation for what it is. But what it does do is dictate how I respond to that crap situation - that is the one part of a situation that I always have control over.
At first, controlling our response to situations may indeed seem contrived or fake but that it only because our natural tendencies have taken us a far different course for so long. But just as in any training, it will eventually become habit. Now I am by no means a master at this but what a blessing it would be to habitually look at life in a hope-filled, excited, joyous manner?!
I'm writing this at my desk at 8:25 in the morning. My day officially starts in about five minutes and today I'm going to practice what I preach. I'm going to exercise my attitude and work to see and respond to things in a way that is helpful. I'm going to act as if God is glorified most through my smile. Because perhaps the grandest experiment we could undertake on a daily basis is to live in world that feels well justified in its pessimism, rise above it, and see if others follow.
1 comment :
Thanks for the shoutout, dude! Hehe.
Indeed, though hard sometimes, living the life we preach is definitely worth the effort. I mean, for real, we're called to nothing less. If you're really into living a life for Christ and giving it up to Him, you'll do what you can to be that... um... container or recepticle or whatever for God's grace/love/patience/others-centeredness. Maybe it's more like a mirror, and the closer you get, the cleaner the image is. Oooo, nice one. And it takes discipline to do so, but by doing so, you'll end up being excited to live the life for Him. That's what I've found.
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