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?

 

 

Being a Prodigal - journal entry from 9/2006

Prodigal - n. A person who spends, or has spent, his or her money or substance with wasteful extravagance; spendthrift.

What is my substance? Have I spent it well? I just came across these thoughts that I wrote in a notebook about a year ago, and they've gotten me thinking again:

September, 2006

Does fairness really matter to God? I grew up thinking so. Being the youngest of three brothers, fairness was what I used to try and get my way. If my brother got it, I needed it too. Of course, I always thought I had the short end of the stick. You couldn't convince me that I was the spoiled younger brother. I remember one summer in high school, I worked with my dad off an on in our backyard. We were layering the hillside with these cement retaining walls. My duty was to carry huge cement blocks, and bags of concrete from the front yard to the hill so that Dad could build the walls. I worked for $5 an hour, which I felt I was doing partially as charity. Feeling like I had done something good with my time all summer, I felt very disappointed at the end of the summer when my brother was awarded with his own computer, but I didn't think he earned it. I didn't think it was fair.

About a year ago, I was in an art class, and I was given an assignment to go to a local a

rt museum and analyze a painting. I went to the Timken Museum of Art in Balboa park and I stumbled upon this painting of The Prodigal Son. I knew the story from the Bible, and I began to think about what was going on in this painting. After a minute or so, I started to get frustrated because I realized this paining was missing an important character; the brother. I thought, "how can they leave out the son who had been there all along, who had stayed and tended the flocks and worked so hard?" At first, I related to this brother - not in the sense that my brother is a prodigal or anything, but in the sense that I felt it was so unfair. Then I began to tell the story over again in my head. I remembered the point of the story. I remembered how at the end of the story, the father told the other son, "look, your brother is back. This is something to rejoice over." But I don't know that the other brother could have been satisfied with that. How would he let go of the unfairness? How could he be happy that his son, who had basically stolen from his father, was now welcomed with a feast? 

I wrote my paper and continued to struggle with this for a few months. Then, one day I was riding with a married couple who goes to my church and I just felt like asking them a question that I always wondered about. I asked, "How do you two handle finances. I mean, if one of you wants to buy a new toy or go out with a friend for a dinner, how do you justify it? Is it a Quid pro quo deal?" I felt certain that this is how it worked for couples, but the wife gave me a surprising answer. She said, "We don't really see it that way. You see, we're a team, not opponents. When he wanted to get his pilot's license, I knew it would make him happy, so it makes me happy. But I didn't need something in return to make it fair." 

This conversation continued and made me think for weeks. I thought, what if I used this mentality towards my family? I realized that my family is my team. Whatever things my brother experienced, that I didn't get to experience helped him to be who he is- and that's a win for our team.

So here's the point after all of that. I have had a lot of conversations lately about Hell. I struggle with the idea that it even exists or that people go there. In all my conversations, the argument I hear is that it wouldn't be fair if everyone got to go to heaven. I began to think, if God wants us to be a community, to be a church family, then why are we so bent on excluding each other from God's grace? Why do some churches call this a "race"? Doesn't God want us to be a team with all the people around us? It shouldn't be about what's fair, but it should just be about grace.

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* It's been over a year since I wrote this, and some thoughts have changed. I got to thinking lately that I have not been really living out my beliefs in regards to fairness. I still struggle with my desire to have what everyone else has, because it's only fair. Because of this, I have not fully given of myself the way I should as a Christian. Maybe after all, it turns out that I am the prodigal son myself. I am him because I have been squandering my substance; the ability that God gave me to give love and give grace on a daily basis.