Better Motives

The best way to improve how you feel is to choose bet­ter motives for doing what you do. It is easy to get used to liv­ing out of lesser motives. Doing so is symp­to­matic of spir­i­tual lazi­ness. By pas­sively let­ting the motive of the moment carry the day, we can drift into shal­low pet­ti­ness. Feel­ings fol­low motives. Infe­rior motives cause us to feel cheap.

Dig­ging down to find your bedrock motives is a good thing to do. Though it is a pretty good idea not to get stuck in “why” — it also pays to ask it a few times. Why am I writ­ing this? How many lay­ers of super­fi­cial motives do I have to pen­e­trate to find the ulti­mate rea­son for what makes me tick? Do not be dis­cour­aged by what you may find along the way. Admit­ting the infe­rior motives is nec­es­sary to find­ing the supe­rior ones.

I have found that deep in the human heart a world of super-motives resides. Once you get beneath the lay­ers of pain and dis­ap­point­ment, you find an inner self that has godly capa­bil­i­ties. It lies buried in our per­sonal life his­to­ries. Fol­low the motive trail into it and see if you do not dis­cover a bet­ter self than you think you are. Learn to work from the cen­ter out. The list of ulti­mate motives is brief: love, desire to be what God made you to be, and a gen­uine inter­est in the wel­fare for self and all others.

We set­tle for being happy when at heart we really want to be holy. Amuse­ment becomes a cheap sub­sti­tute for soli­tude. Con­tent to go through the motions of life, we won­der why it seems to have lost mean­ing. The more we seek out­ward solu­tions the more frus­trat­ing it all becomes. Get­ting cen­tered in a still quiet place and look­ing within is the short­cut through the maze of imag­ined needs. The power of your deep­est essen­tial motives is more than you will ever need for a truly amaz­ing life — and the bet­ter feel­ings that go with it.