My Elephant Has a Motivation

Hard to believe it has been almost two weeks since the first posts.  When I began this blog, I thought I had plenty of topics to write about--still think that, but then doubts began to set in as I read other bloggers.  Am I writing too formally?  Am I talking about things that people care about?  And suddenly, I had paralysis.  Then I thought, "Hey, throw things against the wall-- get the conversation going."  As the Sundance Kid said to Butch Cassidy, "That's what you do best, Butch . . . ."

Events this past weekend have led me back to the tease in my first entry about a book I was previewing, Switch, by Chip and Dan Heath (Heath Brothers).  Add the book I am currently re-reading,  Donald Miller's A Million Miles in a Thousand Years ( Donald Miller), and the one I just finished, Francis Chan's Forgotten God ( Forgotten God ), to the mix and there are some interesting ingredients in this salad.

(Yes, my reading selections are, like me, all over the place.  As I tell my college classes, I usually have 4 or 5 going at the same time.  No, I am not ADD.  Well, maybe.)

A crucial point in all 3 books-- What motivates us to change?   The Heath's say that we have to find the emotion. Get that big elephant in our lives moving.  Knowing something is not enough by itself.  Miller? The desire to write a better story.  The acknowledgment that "there is a writer outside ourselves, plotting a better story for us, interacting with us, even, and whispering a better story into our consciousness" (86).  Chan? Listening to and daily following the Holy Spirit. 

So what keeps us from changing?  Pain and Fear.  With change comes pain and we don't like pain.  It is for that reason that abused women frequently return to the relationship in which they were abused-- it is safer than the alternative.  We do the same thing-- look for the safe way.

And "fear"?  Well, we all fear the unknown and change leads us into the unknown.  But, as we have often been told, "Do not fear" is repeated more in scripture than any other commandment.  Yet, as Chan reminds us, we tend to run from situations where we need God and that running away, Miller reflects, causes us to lead boring lives.

We want lives with a better story; we want lives with joy. To tell that better story and to achieve that joy, we must change.  We must bear the pain.  We must listen to and follow the Spirit that will guide us in the right paths.  It will not lead us astray, but we must act now.  We must surrender ourselves to the leading of the Holy Spirit today.  We must get our elephant moving.  God cares more about what we are doing today than what we will do next year. 

As Chan says, it's "less demanding to think about God's will for your future than it is for us to ask Him what he wants you to do in the next ten minutes.  It's safer to commit to Him someday instead of this day (120)." 

If we want the better story and the joy that comes with it, we must commit to the here and now and recognize that the pain of change will last for only a short while and that the joy will last for a life-time.  The events of this past weekend have started my elephant on the road to change.