Simple Concepts, part 1

I feel like my voice has been silenced at  some point in the last few weeks. Thoughts are attacking my mind like a swarm of bees around a hive and I can seem to calm them down  enough to put them into words in any organized fashion. Lately I catch myself talking and talking and talking. My thoughts keep forcing themselves out of my mouth in such an unorganized way that I simultaneously feel extremely misunderstood in conversation. The truth is, everything feels like it’s becoming so simple to me, but simple concepts seem impossible to communicate.

A year or so ago, my friend Brad taught me what we call “The Game”. It’s a simple game that will ruin your life (at least if you don’t forget the game the minute you learn it). It goes something like this:

The Game

Rule 1: Anyone who starts playing the game plays for life.

Rule 2: Any time you think of the game, you lose the game

Rule 3: Any time you lose the game, you must tell everyone you’re with.

Three rules. Simple, huh? But every time I explain the game to someone, the first question I get is, “OK, so what’s the game, how does it work?”

Have our lives become so complicated that we can’t understand how to put three rules together? Have we lost the creativity to take three rules and begin playing the game? Instead, we always seem to need to be told how. This idea has been hitting me on a few levels lately; War, peace, economics and love. Today I am writing mostly about the latter.

One of the misunderstood concepts spreading throughout the nation is the notion that our country needs to return to morals. I disagree. A moral is not any sort of an assumption of fundamental truth, and morals themselves are often subjective. A moral is a lesson derived from a situation, story or piece of information, and morality is a way to live these lessons through the goodness and badness of human character. I believe that this is where morals miss the mark. What can be accomplished by defining a rule, or lifestyle around the badness of human character? When God created man, didn’t he say it was good? If sin truly entered the world, sure sin would be bad, and sure evil may be in existence, but did it change the goodness of human character, or just the goodness around the human? Are we sin, or are we sinful?

I have often been disappointed in the way that recovery programs ask their participants to say, “I am an addict.” Why don’t they say, “I am a great person who is addicted?” or “I am an addicted person that hopes to grow stronger?” Addiction should be treated as an adjective and not a noun.  I myself admit to addictions – Mainly consumerism and unhealthy food choices. I am not an addict though. If consumerism is the nature of my being, then I have no chance at recovery. Likewise, if we define humans as bad or evil people, rather than people who have done bad or evil things, what chance do they have? Have we given up on hope for our neighbors? If God created us as good, I do not believe a person can be bad at the core.

With that being said, let’s return to the idea of morals, starting with this – Morals are derived from principles. Though morals are similar to principles, they are a way of taking a principle and feeding it through a grinder with historical perspective, culture, and the assumption of good and evil as being a part of human character. Hmm… sounds to me like a moral turns out to be a byproduct of a little truth, a little experience, a little opinion, and maybe some chili powder. How much is our culture run on byproducts? Nothing is pure anymore. Chicken isn’t chicken; it’s  chicken byproduct. Butter isn’t butter, it’s mixed with too many things. This is one of the largest contributors to health problems today. Likewise, spiritual byproducts are killing our belief systems. I want to get back to the core, the raw truth. This is why I prefer the word principle. Principle is defined as “a fundamental truth or proposition that serves as the foundation for a belief, a behavior, or a chain of reasoning.” Can we get back to principles instead of morals?

What does this mean? If a principle is a fundamental truth as defined above, then where does it come from? That’s hard to answer since we all have different religious beliefs, but lets examine something that I believe everyone holds as a fundamental truth - love. I think for certain we have in our nature a sense of Love. Love is defined in so many ways from friends to family to spouses, etc. Jesus said that all laws, all commandments are fulfilled when we love God and our neighbor. What more do we need than love?

I know what 99% of people will say from this; “yeah, but you can’t just love everyone everyday in every way if they’re not all willing to do the same. They’ll steal from you or take advantage.” This is what my mom calls an ANT or an Automatic Negative Thought. Remember, if you are doing your role of loving, what can go wrong? Ok, so someone steals from you. Remember, if you hold on to that treasure in the first place, you are not living out the principle of loving God. I couldn’t believe how many people I shocked when my car was broken into last year and I said, “well, they must have needed my wallet and phone power chords more than I.” I don’t say that to tout myself, but to teach myself that my love is flawed if I can’t always answer that way. Things are not ours, land is not ours, stuff is not ours. Still, Love is too simple a concept for some to really get. Even when Jesus tried to tell his disciples to simply love God and your neighbor, the teachers right away tried to complicate it with “who is my neighbor.”

I’ve heard people say that love is complicated – the types of love, the ways to love, who you love, failure of love, etc. But again, these are byproducts of love. Love at its core is simple, and should require no explanation. Yesterday, in church we read a verse where Jesus said, “love recklessly” (John 12:25). So I wonder why we constantly try to cut our losses before letting ourselves love someone. Why do we love just half way to protect ourselves and our things? I’ve been told that it’s easier said than done, but I say it’s too simple for that to be true. In fact, its far easier done than said! I have heard of enough problems that can come from doing the right thing, but we protect ourselves too much at the cost of others.

Now, let me wrap this up by returning to the beginning of this conversation. I had questioned why we need to be told the “how” instead of creating the “how”. In the many stories of Jesus, he constantly told us to love. He gave us the "what" (love), the "who(m)" (God and neighbors), the "why" (because it makes a better world), the "when" (indefinitely), and the where (everywhere). He gave many examples in his life that answered the “how”, but even the Good Samaritan story did not define every future scenario. We constantly have to define the how by returning to the core -the fundamental belief and the principle - of love.

I leave you with this question:

When will it be enough just to do something because it’s the right thing to do?