A Mormon Woman's Reflections on Life and the Gospel of Jesus Christ

Ever see yourself as Adda in A Bug’s Life …the up-and-coming queen bee–frenetic, anxious, and breathless–trying to be in control of her destiny and never quite feeling so? Or how about Rabbit in Pooh Party? Let’s rewind the tape on that one for a moment. Here’s Rabbit–preparing for a party, following a predetermined “schedule”–an air-tight list of things to do which he believes to be the guarantee to a successful party. He seems to be stressing over his lengthy list, tacked up by the bathroom mirror, as he pours over it while brushing his teeth! Poor Rabbit–In the process of striving for the perfect outcome, he completely destroys any chance of it! Over-focused on the end, he is unsurprisingly oblivious to the immediate–and intermediate–needs of those around him.

We watch Pooh standing at the kitchen table, assigned to bake a cake, struggling to decipher the recipe, dumping salt in the bowl instead of sugar–his pleas for help drowned out by Rabbit’s pacing and the incessant ticking of his watch. After blindly egging Pooh on, Rabbit chastises Piglet for innocently putting up Halloween decorations instead of birthday-party-appropriate ones–missing any opportunity to teach or encourage the sensitive party novice.

Moreover, we observe Tigger reprimanded for having just a little too much fun, not wiping windows to just the right rabbit-cadence. Funny, Rabbit is so intent on micro-managing yet, in more ways than one, he’s not “managing” at all! And then we’re hit with Rabbit’s telling remark, when challenged by Piglet for his synchronized behavior: “Fun? Who said anything about having fun?” Trying desperately to be in control, Rabbit forfeits it, and loses joy in favor of a miserable but all-too-comfortable mindset and mania.

Turning Others Into Objects
To Rabbit, Tigger, Pooh, and Piglet had become objects-vehicles to ‘make’ his party happen. He temporarily lost sight of them as friends, as real, feeling, thinking beings, and instead viewed them only in terms of his objective. When they didn’t serve him as ‘vehicles’ contributing to his goals-that is, when they set him back in his perceived agenda, they became “obstacles’ to him. When they were proceeding with instructions as directed for a second or two, they became irrelevant. In each of these cases, one thing remained the same. They became objects to Rabbit.

We might not think, at first glance, that is the case with us, since most of us have lofty and noble goals which involve the good of others. But as we reflect further, and ask ourselves how we see those others with whom we interact as we pursue those goals –as real people or as vehicles in or obstacles in our lives-we may find that our actions and ‘seeings’ are, at least occasionally, different than what we’d hoped for. We may not even yet realize that with all our spinning on, eating meals in wheels, watching world in a minute, hurrying to and through meetings, prodding family members to do their chores or get ready for bed-that we may often be missing the real cues of our children and co-workers-under the illusion that we are serving by completing the duties on our lists. We are sometimes under the mistaken assumption that the faster we go, the more we’ll achieve, and the more control we’ll have over our lives. For some of us, our eyes are not yet open to that tantalizing myth and its subsequent self-deception.

Perhaps this story can help us to see how easy it is to slip into this way of treating others who come into our lives when our hearts are pre-set on some particular agenda. C.S. Lewis says it succinctly in The Screwtape Letters, in the imagined words of the devil himself: “You must therefore zealously guard in [man's] mind the curious assumption ‘My time is my own.’ Let him have the feeling that he starts each day as the lawful possessor of twenty-four hours.” With that assumption, the devils continue, he will be “ill-tempered and injured.” Lewis continues, the devil speaking:

…[Nothing] throws him into a passion so easily as to find a tract of time which he reckoned on having at his own disposal unexpectedly taken from him. It is the unexpected visitor when he looked forward to a quiet evening or the friends’ talkative wife…that throws him out of gear. They anger him because he regards his time as his own and feels it is being stolen” (79).

If we clutch the covers of our life too closely–and the moments of our time too tightly, we will smother ourselves along with the Lord’s will. It is clearly the adversary’s emissaries who would have us slavishly tied to time–or to a system of using it–to distract us from the purpose it is there–that of responding to the needs of others.

Running To and Fro in the Earth
The Adversary would have us be as he is–running “to and fro” in the earth–going through the motions but missing the mark. He would have us coursing through our lives like the charlatan sap of the leafy fig tree mentioned by Christ himself–showing long lists of self-accomplishments with no real fruits, leaves and lists that have little to do with building others which is His work, His love, and His glory.

What’s Happened To Trigger Time Ownership?
What’s happened to precipitate this kind of over-management in our lives? How could we become so insistent on outcomes? Let’s think about it. It has to do with wanting to feel we direct all that happens to us. We would like everything to tally up neatly on the ledger of life. We like recipes. If we add one cup of water and two tablespoons butter to our brownie mix, we will be guaranteed delicious fudgy dessert bites. It we take two teaspoons of medicine and get rest, we’ll be fine in the morning. If we issue consequences to our children, they will turn out right. If we run around doing everything on our to-list each day, we’ll get into heaven!

But what if it were so formulaic? What if we knew, in advance, that if we obeyed a certain designated system of time-management, we could ‘make’ everything turn out rosy? Wouldn’t such a walk strip us of faith? Isn’t it faith-less to say that we can plan all our planning so well that we squeeze out the possibility of any other outcome but our own designated one? Is the problem not our very assumption that we are to be in total control of our lives? Our plans? Our time? Doesn’t that smack of the same trap that our forebears fell into while building the tower of Babel? They thought they could plan their way right into heaven, gather their co-workers, and make it happen. Instead, they were scattered.

This isn’t to say that there isn’t a clear way to achieve our divine destiny. For certainly the plan is laid out before us. But it is not scripted entirely in advance for each of us. And since it is divine, it requires an element of faith to activate it. The walk will be tailored and will require faith to receive foresight and knowledge needed for steps forward. The Savior’s way requires more than ‘doing’ everything by sheer will power and self-exertion. It is more than accomplishing the work of our own hands and hoping it will get us through the pearly gates.

The Control Conundrum
Let’s take a further look at the notion of control, for the notions that we own our lives-or can control them completely-and that we own our time are close-kin counterfeits. Our culture clearly privileges the notion of control. In fact, it over-privileges it! “Control” is clearly one of the buzz-words of recent decades. We don’t have to delve too far into book titles, talk shows, parenting paraphernalia to catch continuing popular advice on the notion that we are or should be in control of our lives ourselves.

All of us recognize the ring of generic titles like, “How to Get What You Want from Your Spouse,” “How to Get Control of your Life,” “How to Get Your Children to Listen to You.” Again, the assumption behind some of these titles is that is right, good, natural to be in control of every outcome in our lives–even in the lives of others. Under that assumption, we are the ones with the master remote control, and we must push all the right buttons in order to create a livable fulfilling world. It’s pretty convincing.

We are born and bred to believe that we need to drive the ship, “get” others to produce for us. It is a day in which we’ve been indoctrinated–from boxtops to boardrooms, from Hollywood to cultural conversations–to believe that we are to be in control of our lives, that we can do anything we set our minds out to do by believing, thinking, achieving it ourselves.

That’s quite an assumption. For if we are in absolute control of our lives, God is not; if our lives reflect only our will, they cannot be a reflection of His. In short, it is to say, we can make it–we can be successful–on our own, without God and by the sheer power of our wills and our own brute strength. It’s true that we are to be actively engaged in doing good and that we are agents, with intelligent minds, who can make decisions and exercise judgment in all the affairs of our lives. But to do this alone, to claim or to act as if we can do it all ourselves, is to be misled and mistaken.

The mindset of Rabbit and the doctrine tucked beneath the speed trap–that we are to be in total control of our lives–that we can make anything happen if we will it, plan it, schedule it, and execute it–is the mindset of humanism.

Addiction to a System
I like the wise words of Wally Goddard:

A planner can be addictive, giving us a false sense of our own power. A planner must never keep us from being available to Him-(“Planning our Day vs Seeking a Higher Plan” Meridian Magazine p. 7).

I think Tennyson’s stanza also speaks to this addiction well:

Our little systems have their day
they have their day and cease to be
they are but broken lights of thee
and thou, O Lord, art more than they.
(Tennyson Norton Anthology of English Literature Vol. 2 From In Memoriam A.H.H. p. 1128 vs 16-20.)

Worshiping the Work of Our Own Hands
In those instances where we privilege what we’ve ‘graven’ into our planners rather than what the Spirit may be directing us to do, we shift our work and worship from God to selves without overtly declaring it. Often we are tempted to praise what we check off our to-do list–in effect, “worshiping the work of our hands” in a slightly different but equally real and sense as idolators of silver and stone (Isaiah 2:8).

Worshiping False Self-Images
Another danger lurks closely behind woshipping the results of our to-do lists as if we alone made them happen. It is worshiping an image of ourselves that is created as we overtake the life management reins.

In this mode, many, rather than trying to be devoted parents,  end up striving manaically to be “seen” as “the parent of obedient children.”  The result is self-serving in this kind of over-directedness. It’s as Scott Lovelace says, “I suspect that [the adversary] is still pleased if we seek honesty, thrift, integrity, hope, faith, and even love, as long as we do it for ourselves (“What is Love” This People Magazine).

Balance of Agency & Submission
An over-doing of goals can undermine our best desires. Others become objects, slaves to an image we’ve developed to validate us through a long list of value-laden objectives. This ‘can’ and often does happen as we misapply time-management principles and lose our focus, but it does not necessarily need to happen nor is it implicit in the system itself.

Moreover, this is not to say we don’t have goals and objectives. Not at all. It is to say, instead that busyness isn’t necessarily faithfulness. That is, we can’t earn our righteousness or pre-determine our outcomes by simply keeping a full planner and staying tied to it. I’m struck by the scriptural reminder in the gospel of John. When Nicodemus asks the Savior what he must “do” to get into the kingdom, the Savior doesn’t give him an easy list to subscribe to, to check off presumptuously, but rather says, “you must ‘be’ born again,” a much taller order, and one requiring real work, the submission of the heart to His will and the doing of “the work” that follows that submission (John 3:5). That submission may well lead to a list of things we feel impressed to do, but it will not be the same list and our doing it will be in His way, in His timetable, and to His glory. That is quite a different modus operandi.

Our Agenda vs. the Lord’s for our Lives
Sometimes our goals and objectives, however noble, do not fit the Lord’s timing nor can they be scheduled in. What happens, for example, if the goal we’re feverishly striving for is not the Lord’s–if He doesn’t intend us to be a millionaire by the time we’re forty or to be married at 28? What happens when the outcome we’re working to achieve isn’t realized? Do we then doubt God’s character rather than our own desires to control Him? Are we not, then, worshiping our own wisdom and privileging our own judgment? Do we worry endlessly about outcomes?

I love what the Lord says to us through James. I can picture him speaking today, to someone who has just decided to strike it rich overnight in investing, without consulting the Lord first:

Go to now, ye that say
Today or tomorrow we will go into such a city and continue there a year and buy and sell and get gain.
Whereas ye know not what shall be on the morrow. For what is your life? It is even a vapour, that appeareth for a little time, then vanisheth away.
For that ye ought to say, If the Lord will, we shall live, and do this, or that. But now ye rejoice in your boastings; all such rejoicing is evil.
James 4:13-15

Our big and little plans are no plans without the Lord. I’ve a friend who recounts the difference between his preconceptions about his life and the Lord’s will:

I submitted to the Lord not only to accept the gospel in 1969 but to experience the passing of my first two eternal companions. Married once again in 1987, my wife Signe and I put our families together to total 17 children, 15 of which were living at home when we got married. My own agenda in 1969 was to be a Lutheran minister. Later it was to sing in the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and get a Ph.D. But the Lord’s agenda saw fit to give me a diversity of wives, children, talents, and languages. His version of my life is the better one-for in place me where He did, He was able to work His work through me-to stop the cycle of domestic abuse in the lineages of three wives and their children.

Whether it’s on the large or small scale, making plans without involving God is a costly error. The Lord is discouraging us from wanting to figure it all out in advance, erasing faith, and counting on our wisdom and ability to plan and create ourselves. But we don’t know what shall be ‘on the morrow’ or in the next nanosecond. Only God does and we need to rely on Him for direction, with our best plans held out tentatively, made seeking inspiration and kept at bay, as He molds them and orchestrates a larger one.

As Terry Warner aptly states, “To reckon in detail in advance what each day will bring is to plan for a hypothetical set of imagined tomorrows which may never come.” And in the words of the Lord, ‘Boast not thyself of to morrow; for thou knowest not what a day may bring forth” (Proverbs 27:1).

The antidote to stepping out in front of God, I believe, is “sacrificial listening” and living–submitting our hearts, minds, wills, and therefore our plans and expectations to the Lord and receiving and acting on His–or, as Don Osgood puts it, giving up our right to be in charge and gaining something more (Listening for God’s Silent Language Bethany House Publishers 1995 p. 43).

I am impressed, in my most recent rendezvous with scriptures, with the Savior’s clear pattern of admonition to follow Him-and not to follow a self-written spiritual prescription for growth, healing, wholeness, or happiness. And while many of us claim to be following Him, we often get caught in the booby trap of self-management. We end up trying to do it all ourselves, attempting to take complete control by using a system of our own or one that someone else has devised for us. As a result of our over self-reliance, in this case, we find ourselves chasing peace and bypassing the happiness we are seeking.

It’s noteworthy that when Paul visited the Colossians, he warned them against their desire to attain moral perfection by mechanical means (Bible Dictionary p. 746). This intrigues me. They were thinking, as often we do, that they could focus on the outcome and achieve it through mental and moral effort. If this were true, there would be no need for Christ. But there is need for Him. He supplies the grace that leads us to grow after all we can do. A mechanical system of rules and regulations alone would leave out the possibility of God’s grace.

We’ve talked about two indicators that we’ve crossed the spiritual line in the sand and have overtaken the reins from God-one is crossing the time-line, turning others into objects for our objectives; two is the partner-in-crime, developing self-images that need to be proved by further more micro-management or illusive control over our lives and time. There is a third: Worrying.

Worrying
Worrying is really a symptom of holding the reins of our time and lives too tightly. It is a symptom that we are still in the self-management mode, relying on ourselves more than God. It’s why the greatest adversity we often perceive is one in which we don’t know what will happen or how long it will take. God would like us to give up trying or needing to know the end from the beginning and to walk in faith joyfully rather than anxiously.

When we try to manage our time and our lives, we are, in effect, trying to manage our growth and becoming. But growth is not manageable per se. Let’s look at it this way. Remember the parable of the lily spoken from the Savior’s lips. He calls our attention to His power in the becoming process as He addresses us from the Mount: Behold the lilies of the field, the spin not neither do they toil. Yet Solomon in all his glory is not arrayed as one of them” (Matthew 6:28-29).

The Lord suggests something to us about our growth and the growth of our loved ones. It, like the rest of our lives, cannot be forced. A lily wakes into loveliness as it takes in the sun and meets certain conditions. But it cannot grow itself. Growth is a by-product of its being who it is, meeting certain requirements necessary for health, and then letting God’s grace play over it.

It’s interesting to note that an admonition directly follows the Savior’s parable. The Lord tells us to “give no thought” for the morrow. Many of us have taken that to mean that we don’t need to think or plan at all, but simply to stand by and wait for things to happen. That is the other end of the pendulum swing (and the subject for a separate essay!) and is not the case at all, nor was it the Savior’s intent. As another translation of that phrase indicates, the Savior’s words are “Take no anxious thought.” In other words, don’t worry about those things which are beyond your ability to plan for, which are yet unseen, or beyond your control or ken. You can’t control everything or I would not be over you. You can’t force outcomes and you shouldn’t try.

As we learn who really directs our lives, and as we grow in knowledge that He who has begun a work in us “will perform it until the perfect day,” we will be less likely to jump into a pool of rejection when our resume goes unnoticed or a job opportunity passes-when our plan seems foiled (Philippians 1:6). We will know that a closed door is as much a sign of God’s hand in our lives as an open one. We will let go of our agenda when we need to, so that we don’t break the hinge on the door of opportunity that awaits us.

When money for needed transportation or four children’s education doesn’t seem to there in spite of our ‘plans’ and saving and preparations, we can wait on the Lord without the worry that stems from spiritual blindness and trying to control every outcome-joyfully anticipating His sweet intervention.

When someone suffers pain as a result of someone else’s personal or professional mistake, or when someone dies at a young age, we will, knowing God operates only in love, be more able to watch His purposes unfold.

What a difference it is to do what we can and then let God’s grace play over us. What a difference to do what we feel inspired to do, to carry out what’s on our list, with His revisions and timing and gifts, than to execute fully on our own.

It seems easy to rock back and forth on the seesaw of self and God-directed life-management. We sometimes forget we have an “Advocate”-who has a plan, who intercedes, who can transpose it and carry it out better than we could ever dream if we are resilient enough and wise enough to listen, receive it, and follow it. Our agency is not forfeited but magnified in that process.

I once recognized that my understanding of the phrase, faith in Jesus Christ was incomplete though I didn’t know the missing portion. It seemed obvious to me that faith needed to be centered in Jesus Christ. But more recently, I’ve come to see what I was missing. If my faith isn’t in Jesus Christ, then my faith is in myself-my own ability to win salvation (success, happiness, desired outcome) or in a system that is supposed to do the same-rather than in the grace and power of Christ which is accessible to me thought His atoning sacrifice.

May our eyes begin to be opened to ways that we can substitute faith in ourselves for faith in Christ, and may we have the wisdom to do all we can under inspiration and to let Him do the rest.

Notes
1 Warner, C.Terry Bonds of Anguish Bonds of Love

2 Warner, Ibid.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 2nd, 2009 at 6:48 pm and is filed under Devotional Digest, Questions & Answers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.