Obligation or Celebration?

Motives deter­mine how you feel. When you dread some­thing, and just make your­self do it out of oblig­a­tion, you do not enjoy it. You go away feel­ing drained and crit­i­cal. When you are cel­e­brat­ing some­thing the ener­gies seem to flow end­lessly. It is a pretty sim­ple for­mula: pick your motives and you auto­mat­i­cally pick your feel­ings. Things done from love make you feel more lov­ing. Things accom­plished out of neces­sity only leave you feel­ing empty.

You can divide peo­ple into two broad cat­e­gories on this one. One group rel­ishes life, the other begrudges almost ever action. Problem-solving may be an occa­sional neces­sity, but as a pri­mary motive, you end up feel­ing like life’s hired hand. You are doing things just for some sort of expected end result (com­mon among addicts). When a per­son skips the process and goes straight for the bot­tom line, he or she begins to treat all peo­ple and events as means rather than ends. In other words, if life is just a mat­ter of fix­ing this prob­lem or that, you will end up using your­self and oth­ers, and you will not enjoy much along the way.

Putting your heart into what you do is the key to hap­pi­ness. I have found that when I set­tle down into the small tasks, then I enjoy them and have lots of energy left over after I accom­plish them. If I do them just to get them out of the way, then I fall into pro­cras­ti­na­tion, dread, and feel­ing end­lessly drained over minor tasks. If you are doing things just for the sake of oth­ers, and neglect­ing your­self, you will become a very resent­ful per­son.

The human heart is not man­aged or dri­ven by sheer will. It is charmed. It is coaxed into its hap­pi­est efforts. Once you have your heart in your work, the rest is a piece of cake. Liv­ing on will power alone will shorten your life. In the­o­log­i­cal terms, it is learn­ing how to be led by the Spirit instead of exhausted by the demands of the Law. In an eval­u­a­tion I received many years ago, it was noted that it looked like every­thing I did was in the atmos­phere of a party. The per­son meant that crit­i­cally, I took it as the high­est com­pli­ment. Life is a cel­e­bra­tion not an obligation.