After all that rumination on joy and on how to enact the less familiar modes of love I wish to practice, it turns out that for me for now, at least, the secret is this: “Whoever wants to preserve his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake and the gospel’s will preserve it” (Mark 8:35; see also Matthew, Luke, and John). (Let the record show that this illumination came to me yesterday while on a walk around Mount Nittany Middle School as I waited for Éa’s futsal tournament to begin—at least eighteen hours before I heard it in the scripture readings at church this morning. Thus says the Lord.)
What I mean is that over roughly the past ten years, in response to what I think can be safely summed up as social acceleration, I have grown to guard my attention and energies more and more in an attempt to preserve and optimize them for the subset of life’s overabundant opportunities that happens to make it onto my lists (to-dos, goals, albums to hear, and movies to watch).
I suppose that alone isn’t the problem. However, me being me, two problems arise:
- Some of the items that make it onto my lists are mere “things that are on the earth” instead of “things that are above,” and
- Zealotry for my lists closes me off to novel opportunities, whether presented by impulse (my own or others’), emergent or newly revealed needs and desires (my own or others’), or invitations (God’s or others’). I often respond to invitations as if they are intrusions rather than “dancing lessons from God.”
It’s like I’m a National Park Service employee who has decided it’s my desire or my responsibility to work on a path a hundred yards from the rim of Grand Canyon, where I often find myself working alone, and every single time a colleague closer to the rim invites me to come see what they see or to work alongside them on a path that descends into the canyon, I roll my eyes and shout grumpily, “Can’t you see I’m working?!” Some of the time, I go ahead and join them, but always with my path on my mind.
Since I claim to follow Jesus, such cranky insularity is an invalid option, and it forfeits my soul to keep trying it. Most unsettling among its effects is that I find myself growing stony: both unsympathetic and mildly anhedonic. Eesh! Let me be done with that. And yes, let me come see that vista you keep trying to get me to come see.