by James Webb
Another post from the archives here (April 2011). This one resonated with me more than I expected, and not just because the tax year ended last month. Possibly it’s because the Coronavirus situation and recent health issues for Ruth have thrown up that recurring question for me again – how can one learn to be content in each and every situation?
One of the problems with having written a weekly blog for nearly three years is that you begin to lose track of what you have and haven’t already written. I’d love to not repeat myself, but the chances of that are pretty small. For example, have I written about motivation before? I feel like I have, but I can’t rightly recall in what context, and even after three years I still don’t know WordPress well enough to do something like a keyword search of all my previous blogs.
I was thinking about motivation because I was wondering (again) how much motivation matters if the outcome is something good and worthy. I’ve written before about what a lazy writer I am, but if there’s one thing guaranteed to motivate me it’s reading a bad book that has been well received. It’s happened to me on countless occasions; I pick up a book with the ‘New York Times Bestseller’ seal of approval and find that it’s a bad book. I don’t just mean a book I don’t like, I mean a BAD BOOK, as in it’s horribly written. Nothing motivates me to sit down and write like seeing someone get paid lots of money for doing something I think I can do better. I think that all I really need in order to actually write a thousand-page novel is a steady supply of poorly-written bestsellers, though I’ll probably have gone insane by the time I have written chapter 6.
What I was wondering is, does it matter anyway? If I actually sit down and get something constructive done, does it matter if my motivation is hardly noble? Perhaps it’s actually God’s way of subverting my laziness, cheekily harnessing my own pride and greed? Maybe it’s really a self-destructive base for my writing – after all, can I really claim that my work is worthy if it’s initiated by something unworthy? And having thought about all that, what if my motivation is not really “I can do better” but actually “Readers deserve something better”? No answers today, just thoughts, but I can’t shake the feeling that God would rather I wrote than didn’t write. That’s enough for me at the moment, and I’ll let Him sort out the tangled weave of my motives when He gets round to it.
Hmmmmm. This definitely all feels familiar…
Sometimes an idea just won’t let me go, and so it has been with my thoughts about dependence on God and just asking for what we need each day.
It occurred to me that the future is often a source of anxiety and frustration for me. It doesn’t have to be, but it is. Jesus understood the way that our minds work, which is why he said, “Don’t worry about tomorrow, because you’ve got enough to worry about today.” The thing is, the future is all in my head. How I think about it is what creates the anxiety and the frustration, not the future itself. Developing an attitude of relaxed, daily dependence on the Father is the cure.
This is what I have figured out: If I am thinking about the future, then what I have today isn’t enough, but if I am just thinking about this day, then what I have for today is an abundance. Does that make sense? If I expect God to give me everything I need for my whole life today, then He is a stingy and unhelpful deity. If I expect God to give me just what I need for today, then He is a generous and extravagant Father. I do not have nearly enough to get me to the end of my life (assuming I make it to old age), but He has provided ample to get me through the next twenty-four hours.
This isn’t a rant against wealth or putting things aside for the future, rather it’s a pointed conversation I’m having with myself about where my trust lies. If I take Jesus seriously then my focus is clear – “Put the Kingdom first, and God will take care of the rest,” he said. If I’m seriously putting God and His agenda first, then I can live fearlessly with empty hands. “Father, give us what we need for today,” becomes enough.
Sometimes I challenge myself but more often I leave it to others to challenge me. Recently, I came across an observation made by someone else: the suggestion to pray for ‘our daily bread’ in the Lord’s Prayer is supposed to encourage us towards a daily trust in God to meet our needs. It challenged me because I know that even when I’m asking for my ‘daily bread’ I’m already thinking about what I’m going to eat tomorrow. I’m not in the habit of asking God to meet my daily needs, I’m in the habit of asking Him for a surplus so that I don’t have to worry about empty cupboards for the next few years. I wonder what would happen if all I ever asked for was just what I needed for that day? I know one thing it would change – It’d certainly be an incentive to check in with my heavenly Father at least once every twenty-four hours…
It made me think about ‘stuff’, why I worry about it and why I cling so hard to it. Sometimes I think I justify acquiring stuff by telling myself that it’s another resource I can use for God’s purposes. I’m not sure I’m being entirely honest with myself, and I wonder if – in my case – empty hands are more useful to Him.
I had a little thought last weekend. What if we get to heaven and God asks us to show Him our hands? What if everyone’s hands look the same – damaged and battered and bruised and scarred? But what if our hands aren’t the same? What if God knows that some of us have wounded hands because we’ve worked hard for Him, but others of us have wounded hands because we’ve been holding on to our treasure too tightly?
