Motives and Emotions

Today is one of the busiest days of the year. It is the Sat­ur­day before Christ­mas. The traf­fic will be intense. There will be a near-panic mode for last minute shop­pers. The ten­sion lev­els will be up. The fine line between “Deck the Halls” and “Deck the Cashier” will be tested all over the coun­try. Some­thing as sim­ple as find­ing a park­ing place at the mall can become a sit­u­a­tion lead­ing to minor brawls. In my hum­ble opin­ion, this would be a good day to stay home or to go for a gen­tle walk with the dog.
Panic inspires panic. Some­thing as sim­ple as try­ing to be first in line can lead to mob actions (which killed a Wal-Mart worker in New York this year). Emo­tions play off them­selves, but it all begins with motives. The moti­va­tion to be first can lead to some pretty prim­i­tive actions. Win­ning is pretty much every­thing in our lit­tle world…not the best motive out­side of sports.
Motives deter­mine feel­ings. Actions done from love make love stronger. Gen­eros­ity spreads through­out the soul from even one self­less action. Motives. Choose them and notice the emo­tional strings attached. Lesser motives leave you feel­ing cheap. Greater motives enrich the soul.
We live in an activist world. What is accom­plished deter­mines all. For­get the motive. Get the job done. This type of “bot­tom line” think­ing is part of addic­tive­ness. “End results only” sce­nar­ios make us feel used. When profit alone is the motive, we feel bought and sold. The cur­rent national and inter­na­tional finan­cial cri­sis has not left us with any good feel­ings. We know the motives behind it: greed, self­ish­ness, and polit­i­cal manip­u­la­tion. If we were in addi­tional national debt for help­ing peo­ple, we would not feel bad about it. The cap­stone of the cur­rent era was a sin­gle person’s fifty-billion dol­lar swin­dle. It is easy to feel cyn­i­cal.
I can­not deter­mine the motives for oth­ers. I can only choose my own. What I choose, I rein­force. These days, I am work­ing more from the list given by the Apos­tle Paul that he called “the fruit of the Spirit” — a pretty good list in my opin­ion. Love, joy, peace, patience, kind­ness, good­ness, gen­tle­ness, faith­ful­ness, and self-control — all of them are wor­thy and make you feel bet­ter about your­self. We can­not con­trol how our actions are judged by oth­ers, but we can pick why we do what we do.
Choose peace as your pri­mary motive today, and see if you do not feel more peaceful.