Busy?

Are you too busy to read this entire article? As I observe my own life and the lives of those around me, it seems like we’re all so busy. We keep trying to pack more and more activities into our busy calendars to the point where our calendars fill up months in advance.

I’m not convinced that busyness, by its nature, is intrinsically bad. But busyness in the “wrong” activities can easily distract us from the things which matter the most. A couple years ago, Amy and I began making some huge changes in our lives in order to cut out bad, indifferent, and even some good stuff in order to pursue even better stuff. I have written this article to encourage you to pursue the things which matter most in your life through sharing some of the things we’ve learned from our lives.

Why Are You Busy?

Is it just me, or does it seem like it’s a badge of honor in our culture to be busy?

Me: “How’s it going?”

You: “It’s really busy right now.”

You’ve certainly got that right. You wake up at 5:00am and spend the next three hours getting yourself and everyone else in your family ready for work and school. Then you go to work until 5:00pm, knowing that you have so much more to do, but realizing you need to leave in order to keep your family in order. After driving home, you cook dinner for your family and drive you kids to baseball, softball, soccer, and gymnastics practice. On Saturday, you begin the process of cleaning the house, doing mounds of laundry, and cutting the lawn which seems to grow faster and faster every week. On Sunday mornings, you really want to sleep in, but instead, you rally the troops again to go to church. And then you spend the rest of your Sunday afternoon grocery shopping, finishing the laundry, and getting things ready for the upcoming week. Yeah, I’d say you’re pretty busy. You’re not a busy beaver; you’re busier than a beaver.

Why do you want to be busy? Seriously, I encourage you to ask yourself this question: Why do I want to be busy? Do you think busyness defines how valuable you are? Do you think more busyness equals more accomplishment? Does your busyness allow you to avoid being haunted by your “demons?” Does your busyness pacify the criticism of other people? Or do you have a different reason for wanting to be busy?

Now I’m going to ask you another challenging question: How’s your busyness working out for you? Is your busyness helping you live out your life purpose? Or are you like the average American who doesn’t even know his or her life purpose?

What Is Your Family Mission Statement?

Have you ever heard of a family mission statement? The first time I heard of a family mission statement was while reading a book called Family to Family.[1] In the midst of discussing characteristics of healthy families, the authors presented the idea of developing a family mission statement. A family mission statement describes the purpose of a family. It answers the question: Why does your family exist? I’ll be honest, when I first read the section about developing a family mission statement, I was like, “Are you serious?” It sounded so business-like. But the more I thought about it, the more I saw how important a mission statement was for us.

When Amy and I first got married, we were two separate individuals going in two different directions. Although our purposes for existing had some commonalities, we were not completely in alignment with one another. We didn’t yet know what it looked like to be a family who made decisions as a team rather than two individuals who made unilateral decisions, living as nothing more than roommates. To make matters even worse, neither of us was able to verbalize our individual mission statements. When we were presented with new “opportunities” such as changing positions at work, becoming more involved in our church, or attending training events, we took them thinking that they would somehow help us live out our undefined mission statements.

At this point, you can probably observe the missional crisis we faced. We desperately needed a common ultimate purpose to which both of us lived out which would serve as a guideline for making family decisions. We needed a family mission statement.

Are you experiencing a similar family missional crisis? If you are, I would encourage you to ask yourself: What is our family mission statement? Your answer to this question will be your guide to determine which activities you want to be busy doing and which ones you should probably stop doing.

You don't need to be married and have children in order to write a mission statement. Even if you're single, I still encourage you to write yourself a mission statement to guide you in the way you spend your time.

At this point, you may be wondering how to write a mission statement. Different people have different opinions on this, but my rule of thumb is to keep it short and simple. Write a one-sentence statement answering the question: Why does your family exist? Once you have developed your family mission statement, stick to it. It's perfectly acceptable to change it over time as you continue to mature and things change in your life, but if you find yourself wanting to change it every month, then I'd encourage you to force yourself to keep it the same and stick to it for at least a year.

Do Our Activities Support Our Family Mission Statement?

It’s easy to find ourselves in the place where Amy and I ended up. Seemingly everyone around us has a plan for our lives. Our boss wants us to work longer hours and travel more. Business owners want us to spend our money buying products at their business. Our church leaders want us to serve on the praise band, babysit toddlers in the nursery, or run the finances. When we let everyone around us dictate our schedules, then we find ourselves being busy doing lots of activities, but we may not be busy living out the reason for our existence. Instead of letting everyone else tell you where to spend your money, time, and energy, I would encourage you to be empowered to spend it in ways that enable you to live out your purpose.

Once Amy and I developed our family mission statement, we weighed all our activities against it to determine whether our activities served to help us live out our family mission statement. As expected, we determined that some of our activities weren’t helping us live out our family mission statement, so we decided to cut them out. After we narrowed down our activity list, we took another look at it to determine if it was still too big, which we decided it was. This forced us to eliminate things from the list which we thought were helping us live out our family mission statement, but not as well as other things on our list. Of course this process was very difficult, but it has proven fruitful in the long run.

To give an example, one of the things we eliminated was visiting multiple grocery stores every week in order to find the best deals on every food item. This activity was saving us money, but we decided we could use that time better elsewhere. We replaced it with intentionally spending more time with our friends since this activity aligns much better with our family mission statement.

If you want to keep up your sustainability for the long haul, then there’s one final piece to making it happen. We've noticed that it doesn’t take long for the “margin” we’ve created in our schedules to get consumed with more activities. I would encourage you to continue resisting the urge to agree to do things which aren’t helping you live out your family mission statement, even if you think you have the money, time, or energy to do them. Basically, I encourage you to continue saying “No” to the “wrong” activities and “Yes” to the “right” activities. When you agree to a new activity, I would encourage you to drop an activity you are currently doing in order to make room for the new activity.

Conclusion

It’s up to you and your family to decide upon your purpose for existing. Once you agree on a family mission statement, stick with it and don’t give in to the peer pressure to be distracted from it. And finally, continue evaluating your activities on a regular basis. Busyness for the sake of busyness is pointless; if you’re going to be busy, get busy doing the “right” activities.

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[1] Jerry Pipes and Victor Lee, Family to Family: Leaving a Lasting Legacy (Lawrenceville, GA: Jerry Pipes Productions, 1999).

Unselfishness vs. Love - Part 2

Is there a difference between unselfishness and love, or are they one in the same thing? Last week, I began a discussion on this topic by presenting our common cultural beliefs on what makes an action selfish or unselfish. This week, I will wrap up this discussion with a discussion on our common cultural beliefs on love and compare them to the biblical beliefs on love.

The hardest part of defining love is that the word love is used in so many different ways.

“I love pizza.”

“I love my friends.”

“I love my wife.”

All three of these uses of the word “love” are different. The type of love I’m attempting to define in this article is the type that is used in the context of saying, “I love my friends.”

How Do You Know Another Person Loves You?

Do you know someone loves you because he tells you he loves you? Do you know someone loves you because she behaves a certain way when she’s around you? Do you know someone loves you because he wants to spend time with you? Do you know someone loves you because she texts you randomly to see how you’re doing?

Based on my evaluation of our culture, most of us seem to think that “love” is something (a choice or feeling or both) we have in our hearts for someone else which we then express through our actions. However, I could probably get agreement from most of you that our actions alone are an insufficient indicator of whether we love someone. The better indicators of a person’s love for us are the intentions behind a person’s actions.

When we think that someone does what he does because his foremost concern is our goodwill, then we believe he loves us. Conversely, when we think someone does what he does because his foremost concern is his own goodwill, then we question whether he really loves us. Therefore, our way of determining whether someone loves us is by weighing the amount of goodwill the giver intended for us to receive against the amount of goodwill the giver intended to personally receive. If the goodwill intended for us outweighs the goodwill intended for the giver, then we would classify the act as loving.

How do we measure the intended goodwill of a person performing an action? By and large, the way it seems our culture has chosen to measure goodwill is to measure the benefit received from the action. If a person performs an action with the intent of the recipient gaining more benefit than that of the giver, then the action can be classified as loving. Conversely, if the giver intends to receive more benefit from an action than the receiver, then the action cannot be classified as loving.

Based on the way I defined unselfishness in my article last week, it seems that love and unselfishness are synonymous terms with the purest form of unselfishness/love being that someone does something for someone else with the intention of receiving absolutely no benefit. However, I presented a large problem with taking that approach to life which makes this way of living unsustainable. Therefore, I will now present a different definition of love which on the surface could look similar to the type of love I’ve described so far, but at its core, it is very different.

Defining God’s Love

In order to understand God’s love, we have to first lay aside our current paradigms about love because the way of thinking about God’s love is actually quite different than the way our culture thinks about love.

We need to start by answering the question: Who does God love the most? Does God love the world most? Does he love people most? Does he love animals most? The answer to this question is that God loves himself more than he loves anyone or anything else. If he didn’t love himself first and foremost, then he would be contradicting himself when he told us to love him first and foremost[1] and he’d be worshiping an idol, which he also commanded us not to do.[2]

If God loves himself most, then how can he intend to do something beneficial for himself yet not intend for himself to receive any of the benefit from it? If you think this sentence doesn’t make any sense, it’s because it doesn’t. It’s an irreconcilable paradox. God can’t both intend to do something beneficial for himself and intend to not receive any benefit from it. This means God must not define love as the intended benefit given and received from an action.

So why does God do what God does? According to the Psalmist, “Our God is in the heavens; he does all that he pleases.”[3] And according to Paul the apostle, “For it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure.”[4] The reason God does what he does is for his own pleasure. “The chief end of God is to glorify God and enjoy Himself forever.”[5]

Hold on a minute! That’s not what we learned in Sunday school. We were taught that God’s ultimate goal was to save lost people. A God who, first and foremost, seeks his own pleasure sounds pretty selfish and, quite frankly, narcissistic. How can we really call this God loving if he intends to receive great benefit from his actions? This is precisely why we need to set our cultural paradigms about love on the shelf and instead let the Bible, God’s Word, redefine love for us.

What is love according to the Bible? Since there isn’t a verse in the Bible which says, “Love is defined as…”, I’ll turn to a definition which well-respected contemporary theologian John Piper wrote in his book Desiring God: “Love is the overflow of joy in God that gladly meets the needs of others.”[6] Since this definition of love is so vastly different from our culture’s definition, I’m going to briefly break it down.

If love is the overflow of joy in God, then joy (in God) and love are directly connected to one another, with joy coming first and love coming second. The more joy we have in God, the more love we have. Conversely, the less joy we have in God, the less love we have.

This portion of the definition, however, is insufficient to defining God’s love since God’s love doesn’t stop at joy in God. God’s love is the overflow of joy in God which gladly meets the needs of others. The joy we find in God overflows such that it not only willingly, but joyfully meets the needs of other people. The idea of doing something because of duty’s sake or because it’s the right thing to do has no room in this thought process since it is done with disinterest rather than out of gladness.

This is the type of love God has. His love comes out of his joy in himself, which leads him to gladly meet the needs of others, something he does for us every single day. In the same way, this is what God’s love looks like when it’s working in our lives; the love we experience from the overflow of joy in God will gladly meet the needs of others.

Therefore, God’s love isn’t concerned with whether a person’s intention was to receive benefit from an action, but rather, it is concerned with whether the action is done joyfully as an overflow of a person’s joy in God.

A Final Test

Before I wrap up, I want to test this definition with a verse from the famous love chapter of the Bible in 1 Corinthians 13. In this chapter, Paul wrote:

If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing. – 1 Corinthians 13:3

It’s reasonable to conclude that someone’s willingness to give up everything he has and die are indicators of “good” motives. Yet, Paul claimed that someone could perform these two actions, out of “good” motives, while not having love. Moreover, he claimed there was gain to be received if the actions were performed out of love, but no gain if the actions weren’t performed out of love. On all these accounts, I’d say the aforementioned definition of love agrees with this verse: If I give away all I have and deliver up my body to be burned, but don’t have joy in God that gladly meets the needs of others, then I gain nothing. Rather than saying "No pain, no gain," we can say, "No joy, no gain."

This type of love is far superior and much more sustainable than the type of “love” we experience when we do something for someone else with the intention of not receiving benefit in return for our actions. We receive a satisfying experience when we receive grace from God and we receive a satisfying experience when this joy overflows in the act of sharing this grace with others.[7]

Conclusion

In the last two articles, I have attempted to demonstrate that although unselfishness and our culture’s definition of love are synonymous, unselfishness and God’s love are not synonymous. Unselfishness is defined as doing an action with the intention of the receiver receiving more benefit than the giver. Love, on the other hand, is the overflow of joy in God that gladly meets the needs of others.

How do you know whether you have God’s love? Thoughtfully and honestly answer these two questions.

1. Do you have joy in God?
2. Does the overflow of your joy in God cause you to gladly meet the needs of others?

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I hope you’ve enjoyed reading these two articles. Feel free to leave me some feedback on what you liked or didn’t like with the content of this article. I’m more than happy to hear your thoughts and/or engage in a deeper discussion with you on this topic. Additionally, if you have any requests for other topics you’d like me to discuss in my blog, I’d love to hear from you.

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[1] See Exodus 20:3, Deuteronomy 6:5, and Matthew 22:37.

[2] See Exodus 20:4-6.

[3] Psalm 115:3.

[4] Philippians 2:13.

[5] For a much more in depth explanation of this point, see chapter 1 of John Piper, Desiring God: Meditations of a Christian Hedonist, rev. ed. (Colorado Springs: Multnomah, 2011), kindle.

[6] Piper, Desiring God, 1973, kindle.

[7] Ibid., 1981.

Unselfishness vs. Love - Part 1

Is there a difference between unselfishness and love, or are they one in the same thing? Let's take a deeper look at this question.

Unselfishness and Love Are the Same, or Not

We all know selfishness when we see it. Someone who is selfish is focused on him or herself. For example, we, in our society, would call a person selfish who is capable of working but spends his days lazily sitting in front of his television eating potato chips while receiving government assistance. We would probably also call a person selfish if he decided to withhold his usual $30 from the offering plate on Sunday mornings to buy a new fishing pole.

I think the vast majority of people in our society would agree that the behavior exhibited in these two examples is selfish. But not all cases are this easy to determine. Let’s say Bob is Joe’s client and Bob mentions to Joe that he’d really like to go perch fishing on Lake Erie sometime. Joe happens to own a boat and knows where and how to catch perch. Would it be selfish of Joe to offer to take Bob fishing on his boat with him? The action doesn’t seem to be enough information to determine whether Joe is being selfish. Instead, we need to determine the motive behind the action in order to determine whether it’s selfish. If Joe offers for Bob to go with him because he likes Bob and merely wants to do something nice for him, then we’d say it’s probably not selfish. But if Joe offers Bob a chance to go fishing with him because he expects to get more of Bob’s business, then we’d probably conclude that it is selfish.

In all of these examples, whether an action is selfish or unselfish seems to be derived from whether a benefit is expected as a return on the investment. If Joe offers Bob the opportunity to go fishing because he expects more business from him in return, then we would deem the action selfish since Joe is expecting to get something in return. But if Joe offers Bob the opportunity to go fishing simply because he wants to do something nice for Bob, then we would deem the action to be unselfish because he had no expectation of receiving anything in return.

Based on my observations, I would conclude that most people in our society would equate doing something without expecting anything in return with love. As a result, we could substitute the word “love” for the word “unselfishness.” We could then say that Joe is demonstrating love (not in a weird way) to Bob by offering him the opportunity to go fishing with him on his boat if he does it without expecting to receive anything in return.

At this point, we may think we have answered the question: unselfishness and love are the same. According to our society, the most loving act is the most unselfish act and the most unselfish act is the most loving act. But I don’t think we are quite done answering the question because unselfish love poses a rather large practical challenge which cannot be solved within this idealistic framework.

The Problem with Unselfish Love

Let’s say I wanted to be the most unselfish, and therefore the most loving, person to ever live on earth. In order to be completely unselfish and loving, I would have to do everything without expecting anything in return. I would have to invite people over for dinner without expecting them to return the favor. I would have to give money to homeless people without expecting them to repay me. I would have to cook dinner for my wife, Amy, and watch chick-flicks with her without expecting to receive anything in return. These three examples all make sense and sound doable.

But what would happen if I treated every aspect of my life that way? I would have to pour my money, time, and energy into my friends’ lives without expecting anything in return. I would have to go to work every day without expecting to receive a paycheck in return. I would have to invest my money without expecting anything in return. I don’t know anyone who would willingly give in these ways without expecting anything in return. In an ideal world, living out this type of unselfish love is the epitome of the life most of us desire to live. But it practically doesn’t make sense. It’s impractical to always give and never receive.

Do you have needs? I know I do. I have lots of needs. I have a need for food. I have a need for water. I have a need for sleep. I have a need for relational intimacy. If I were to live completely unselfishly/loving, then I would have to do what I do without expecting any of these needs to be met. If you’ve ever lived with one of these needs going unmet, then you realize how dysfunctional you become. For example, let’s say I didn’t eat for a few weeks because I decided I was only going to behave unselfishly. To dedicate time in my schedule to eating would be selfish because I would be doing it in expectation that I would receive benefit from it. As a result of not eating, I would probably starve to death, meaning that I wouldn’t be able to love anybody anymore because I’d be dead! How loving is that?

The conclusion we may draw at this point is that there are certain “selfish” actions which are acceptable and necessary because they allow us to be unselfish the rest of the time. But this raises another dilemma: Where is the line drawn? Which “selfish” actions are acceptable under which circumstances and which ones aren’t? I can see it right now: We could develop a list a mile long describing whether a given action is selfish or unselfish based on the situation. And then we could spend the rest of our lives trying to memorize the list so that we can make ourselves into unselfish people.

Thankfully, I’ve discovered a much better way to live than creating long lists of acceptable and unacceptable actions based on an infinite number of life situations. But unfortunately for you, you’re going to have to wait until next week to find out what it is.