Joy is like sleep: You can’t monitor it and expect it to stay.
Lord, may mine be a proactive, spontaneous, playful, delighting, and unhurried love.
I’m good at loving people by accomplishing and as a form of accomplishment. And I’m good at loving people by paying attention to them when called on or when prearranged. But there are other modes of loving people. I don’t know what they are. But I want to discover them.
Or is it REdiscover them? The above observation of myself is true, but it’s true in part because of the interaction of my psyche and social acceleration, I’m sure of it.
It is not an exercise of privilege to eschew national news. It’s focus.
“Stop asking God to do what God has asked us to do” (person quoted in Jeremy Richards’ sermon today).
“Be yourself,” they say. “Stop trying to be someone else.” But what if who you are is wicked? But then again, who am I to judge myself? In any case, it seems to me the danger with “do the next right thing” is that “there is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death” (Proverbs 14:12, 16:25). If I went with “do the next right thing” unchecked, I’d be lonely, because I’d always choose things I can control. “Do the next right thing” must be defined. And its definition is this: “Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength” and “love your neighbor as yourself.”
C’mon, Enneagram 8! Use your drive for power and control on your own thinking—namely, correct yourself when you are wringing your hands in the face of circumstances you can’t control or people who are speaking or acting in ways you don’t expect. It’s just a variation of the partially reformed perfectionist’s hack: I am not exhibiting self-control if I cannot maintain love and joy when people and things are out of my control. (PSA: People are—justly—always out of my control.)
In recent years, Jesus’ frequent use of the future tense in the causal clauses of the Beatitudes (among a few other, subtler evidences) has inclined me to think of them not as a set of timeless aphorisms (e.g., if-this-then-that precepts or visions of human flourishing), but instead more as an historical announcement in direct relation to Jesus’ advent—a sibling to Jesus’ claim in Luke 4:16-21 to being Himself the messianic fulfillment of Isaiah 61:1-2, and a cousin to the Songs of Mary, Zechariah, and Simeon slightly earlier in Luke.
Hence, when I’m translating or paraphrasing Matthew 5:3-11, I’m now given to rendering μακάριος, traditionally translated “blessed,” as “fortunate,” “lucky,” or most colloquially, “in for a treat” instead and to making explicit the Jesus-specific, redemptive-historical subtext I sense. Like this:
- [Now that I, Jesus, am here,] the poor in spirit are in for a treat, because the kingdom of heaven is theirs.
- Those who mourn are fortunate, because now they’ll receive comfort.
- [In light of what I’m up to,] gentle people are the lucky ones, because they’ll inherit the earth.
- Those who hunger and thirst for righteousness/justice are in for a treat, because [with what I’m doing] that hunger will be satisfied.
- The merciful are lucky, because they’re gonna receive mercy.
- The pure in heart are in for a treat, because [in Me] they’re gonna see God.
- People who make peace are the lucky ones now, because they’ll be dubbed God’s children.
[The above was in response to Richard Beck’s recent post recapping part of Jonathan Pennington’s argument about how to view and translate the Beatitudes.]
Lord, may everything I do today be done out of a deep-seated, automatic regard for You and those around me as important, desiring Your joy and their prosperity.
May I have the self-control to act spontaneously and the spontaneity to be self-controlled.
Leave the gun, take the granola ✏️ 🎤 🎵
In a concordant, resolute response to Damon Krukowski’s brief “Revisiting the Pyramid of Inequality that is Streaming Music,” I remind myself that if I want humanity to keep recording music that isn’t of mass appeal—and I do—then assuming I have the means, I must buy records from the recorders and not merely rent them from the tech fiefs.
Every day is a revolution. ✏️ 🎤 🎵
Just finished reading: A Failure of Nerve (1997) by Edwin Friedman, which Morgan recommended to me. It’s a partial application of Bowen family systems theory to family and institutional leadership. It was sometimes difficult to wrap my head around. But it seems like it might quietly change my life. I’m not going to summarize it, but I will jot down some of what I think I’m taking from it, the first chunk of which draws some connections with Martin Buber:
To get to I and Thou, you’ve first got to have an I. This is the “self-differentiation” Bowen and Friedman view as paramount. Otherwise, you’ll never get beyond I and It: using, pushing around, or simply passing by other people in your life.
One of the ways to do this, or perhaps better, one of the signs that you have done this, is that you manage your anxiety and reactivity by maintaining some emotional distance from your own thoughts and emotions and the thoughts and emotions of others. Not that you should be unsympathetic to yourself or others; on the contrary, it’s only in understanding your thoughts and emotions and those of others—or at least in acknowledging them, even if you don’t fully understand them—that you’ll be able to maintain the distance necessary to be an I and thus be capable of relating to others as sacred subjects themselves.
Be sympathetic, yet be your self, not merely an outworking of the internal, partner, familial, institutional, or society anxieties in which you live. Be in these systems without being of them—except insofar as those systems are love. Only then might you be able to inspire change. (Note that I write “inspire change” and not “change” because a key principle for managing your anxieties and reactivity is to embrace that you cannot change other people.)
All this without disconnecting from others.
Copying from Bob Thune, I’ll recap Friedman’s list that well-differentiated leaders:
- are a calm, steady presence, not reacting to other people’s reactions,
- have a strong sense of self and can effectively separate while remaining connected,
- take responsibility for themselves and inspire others to do the same,
- realize that good, long-term change requires discomfort, and
- take decisive stands at the risk of displeasing others.
Lord, Your command is eternal life (John 12:50).
Noel made a distinction I’d never thought to make before: extraverted is not the same outgoing. He defined the former as something like “given to gaining energy from social interaction” and the latter as something like “fully at ease making new friends, as if by reflexive desire rather than by effort.” This was to help me understand the difference between me, an extravert who isn’t outgoing, and him and Mary, who are extraverts and outgoing.
Now, the APA doesn’t make quite as clean a distinction. Nevertheless, I find the distinction illuminating.
The fact is, Noel and Mary are inspiringly friendly. They show enthusiastic, obviously sincere interest in other people, regardless of their initial familiarity, in the same way that I show enthusiastic interest in virtue, reflective conversation, expressiveness, and good music. I want to be like them.
I do usually find it energizing to interact with new people. But I just don’t seek out such interaction quite as liberally or reflexively. And I’m certainly not as skilled as Noel and Mary at the talk required to make such interaction smooth. Frankly, and to my shame, I’m also not as naturally, actually, intrinsically interested in other people.
But all this may be a matter of exposure and practice. The first step will be to build a new habit: I’ll try to change my behavioral bias such that if I see a neighbor, I’m more likely to approach than to avoid. (I think an overzealous commitment to my own agenda is to blame for the avoidance.)
When love says do, you do
When love says go, you go
Damn your fears
And listen here:
When love says do, you do ✏️ 🎤 🎵
After this He then says to the disciples, “Let us go into Judaea again.” The disciples say, “Rabbi, the Judaeans were lately seeking to stone you, and you are going there again?” Jesus answered, “Are there not twelve hours in the day? If one walks by day, he will not stumble, because he sees the light of this cosmos, But if one walks by night, he stumbles, because the light is not in him” (John 11:7-10).
If love is calling, damn the fear of death. Full speed ahead. Do what is right.
“Why does my heart feel so bad? Why does my soul feed so bad?” All year, You’ve had the strangle moral imperative to joy buzzing around my ears. It could be that I’m putting too much stock in a single command of Paul’s. But with:
- “get to” being the word of the year,
- Travis having made such an impression on me with the primacy he assigns to joy, and
- all the specific words that have come to me on the subject this year,
it has been hard to avoid. And more than ever, the role of joy as an anchor for the words I say to others remaining words of life and not words of death has become apparent. I may not need to dig the well of self-love in order to love others, as so many folks extrabiblically claim, but I do apparently need to dig the well of joy: I have spoken brusquely again and again in recent weeks—this despite all the recent emphasis I have placed in my mind on letting “all my words be full of grace.” Why? Because it’s “out of the overflow of the heart” that “the mouth speaks.” If I feel despair, resentment, embarrassment, or any of joy’s other foils, I will not be able to keep those feelings off my tongue. Hence my alienating Carla yesterday evening after ending the workday feeling embarrassed and guilty that I had wasted an hour (at least) trying to coax ChatGPT and Gemini into providing me with business-hours difference formula I could use in a Salesforce report for Mike when a simple, classic Google search would have led me straight to the answer I sought. Hence my boorishly declaring my annoyance to Carla midmorning today after I spent two-and-a-half hours reviewing the College Township timeline into which she herself has put uncounted hours, a double layer of resentment (her absence and my feeling dragged into it). If I am unhappy, I am more likely—far more likely—to inflict my unhappiness on those around me. As such, digging and tending the well of joy—guarding my heart, as it were—is a moral prophylactic. Joy waters love. If any sentiments might be blocking or contaminating that well, I must spend the time and thought necessary to clear those sentiments out.
It isn’t necessarily wrong to find oneself in a bad mood. But it is wrong not to do something about a bad mood. That’s the lesson of this evening.
I deal with interruptions and pop-up requests at work much more gracefully than I do at home. I haven’t yet internalized and automatized “doing everything without grumbling or arguing” (Philippians 2:14). This despite the facilitation that my realizing that the Prime Desire is always fulfillable should bring. I must be missing a piece at home, something I have at work but don’t have at home. What is it?
At work, I’m glad when work piles up. At home, that stresses me out. At work, when someone approaches me about something they want done, I smile and sometimes even thank them for the cool thing to work on. (Naturally, this is not true when the thing they’re approaching me about is something I built that has broken.) But when someone approaches me about something they want done at home, I grumble and resent.
What are the contextual differences that might account for the differences in my response?
Edit 11/21/25: I was writing about this same stuff almost exactly a year ago.
There’s no such thing as self-reliance.
“Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, in everything give thanks; for this is the will of God for you in Christ Jesus” (1 Thessalonians 5:16-18). There’s a synergy between these three commands. It’s easier to rejoice when you’re praying continually and giving thanks in everything; it’s easier to pray continually when you’re rejoicing always and giving thanks in everything (after all, to whom are we to give thanks for things like existence?); it’s easier to give thanks in everything when you’re rejoicing always and praying continually.
But all these require that you be here now and do what you’re doing, thinking not of other things.
“That man was a lamp.”
– Jesus, John 6:35a, of the John the Baptist
He who is grateful can’t help but be gracious.
“I would have to learn to live in a different way, seeing death as an imposing itinerant visitor but knowing that even if I’m dying, until I actually die, I am still living” (Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air, emphasis mine). I want to carry this thought with me all the time as I age; it teaches me how to relate to others, all of whom will die someday, and how to relate to myself, who will also die someday.