A new year...
We're starting a new year with this post. One week ago the group met up again after a summer break, new faces are coming around the circle, and Simon and Elissa are married along with Amelia and Kyle-- wow, it is going to be a good ride.
Influence
Starting off I just want to acknowledge that is pretty easy for me to sit down and blog. And that it is much harder to live things that I blog about.
I was thinking today about influence, how I impact others and how others impact me. Briefly, I believe that all of us have extreme potential to influence others and honestly most of us do not enact that potential into others lives. I see this happening prominently in our culture through "greater" influences. Only those "greater" forces aren't necessarily the better forces or influences that fit us. I would relate these influential forces to positive and negative correlations. There are positive and negative correlations or relationships between some objects, but no matter if the correlation is positive or negative, there is still the presence of a correlation. Influential forces in my life seem like these correlations.
Forces are at work upon my life such as money. Totally disregarding if money is "good" or "bad", I would say most days the force or stress of money upon my life is greater than the force of God, relationships, or love. Say we pull out the golden rule: love your neighbor as yourself. Why does than not mean much to me? To give you a "soap box preview" I would argue that if more people read C.S. Lewis, specifically, in this case, "The Weight of Glory", the world would be a much better place. But let's lay it out in plain terms.
First, do I even know how I love myself? How do I interact with my thoughts, failures, and strengths? In my life, I always give myself the benefit of the doubt, I am so hard on failure-of-self that I might die early of stress, and I think if I could truly see my strengths and act upon them I would be the most amazing person in the world, but that doesn't mean I hold my strengths that highly as I don't see them most days. As you can see, I tolerate myself, but do I love myself? It has been said that we can only love others as much as week love ourselves. What if I can't love myself? How could I even start to love others?... Should I fake it? So somehow we need to see into our condition and situation enough to understand ourselves even a bit and then turn that towards others.
Second, we love others as ourselves. A good friend told me that believing in his wife is one of the biggest ways he can love her. That really made me think, who do I believe in and who do I roll my internal eyes at? My cousin Tyler has a cell phone that does not function due to user demolition. This cell phone of Tyler's and I have the largest emotional relationship I have ever had with a electronic device. His phone frustrates me so much that, if I wasn't so poor, I would go out and purchase a new phone for him. We are not talking a new plan discount here folks, we are talking a $300 phone. Anyways, because Tyler's phone is messed up he doesn't answer it sometimes, or so he says. What happens is that I don't see him for a few months and he doesn't answer his phone and he lives in Chicago. After a few calling attempts I loose faith in the phone. Then a few more unanswered calls find me loosing faith in Tyler. I do it to a lot of people. But I think I know (sometimes) why I do it. Sometimes, again not all the time but sometimes, I loose faith in people because they do not have faith in themselves and then I am threatened. I start to wonder if I have faith in myself. My self-worth hings on another persons self-worth. In short, my identity comes into question because I feel their identity is in question.
So love is the focus and force of God who is the center of the Gospel. The "golden rule" or greatest commandment is love the Lord your God and love your neighbor as yourself. We each have this great potential to influence lives and change the world and bring the Kingdom. One of the main ways we might contribute is by running with God on the golden rule. Then we find out that we not only can love others but we can't love others because we can't even love ourselves. Moreover, if we can't love ourselves or others, can we love God well? Where do you go from here?... (comments please!)
