BP 230
“It is only when we realize that life is taking us nowhere that it begins to have meaning” ~ P.D. Ouspensky.
Today’s post is the second of two installments identifying truths to walk in as you strive to live life with meaning, joy, and relational depth. I will be proffering a list below that supplements the truths I shared last week.
Everyone must discern why they are here on this planet and what gives them meaning. P.D. Ouspensky in his quote above offers a life philosophy that feels very empty and devoid of meaning even though he claims that when you know life has no meaning then it has meaning. I have one word for such a philosophy: nonsense. It is the type of quote atheists throw out to try to smuggle meaning into a world that has no meaning. Atheists often want to minimize the ramifications that follow when the existence of the God who created the universe on purpose and for a purpose is denied.
Can I edit an old axiom to say, “Know God know meaning. No God no meaning.”
I much prefer the C.S. Lewis quote about the meaning of life: “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.” Or consider even Albert Schweitzer’s words: “Life becomes harder for us when we live for others, but it also becomes richer and happier.” I also favor G.K. Chesterton’s comment about life: “When it comes to life the critical thing is, whether you take things for granted or take them with gratitude.”
Okay, let’s move on from reflections pertaining to the meaning of life to truths that will help you live everyday life with purpose. Hopefully all or many of these, when practiced, will help you draw nearer to God, other humans, and even to your own heart.
+ Remember the Well, the Leakage, and the Volcano. Similar to last week’s truth that God has given you three mediums to communicate (words from your mind, emotions from your heart, sensations and pain from your body), God has designed you to be a Well from which you draw up (with a metaphorical bucket) things like words, emotions, needs, your deepest self every day that you then pour out and share with God and others. If you move toward others and allow them to know you through the Well (remember, life is all about relationship), you will be in a good position to love God and others and to receive love. If you shut the Well down for any of a number of reasons, then you will either express yourself through the Volcano of anger or through Leakage in many different forms: depression, anxiety, addictions, perfectionism, irritability, other mental illness like OCD or EDs, sleeping issues, nightmares, control issues, aloneness, bodily pain including burning skin, headaches, stomach issues, and muscle tension. Why will you leak out or erupt like a volcano? Because God made you to be seen and known. If you shut down and move away from others, He has designed you to experience symptoms that tell you and others that you are not pursuing relationships but are hiding and not receiving love. So, use the Well! You were made to be in relationship. Nothing else on this planet is more important.
+ Related to the truth above, humans are predisposed to hide. See Genesis where Adam and Eve hid from God in the Garden. When and how do you hide? Do you hide because others will hurt you or be angry with you or do you hide because you believe you are too needy or will be too angry if you are honest about your heart? Or do you simply hate messiness? Just today, a woman told me she hides because she will be a burden for others. She also said there is something wrong with her (she doesn’t know what that is specifically) and she cannot allow others to see that flaw in her.
+ The danger of settling is a human tendency. Don’t get lulled by your flesh, Satan, and the culture of this world to settle for fleeting pleasures or shallow distractions that rob you of an eternal relationship with the God who made you as well as with your fellow beings.
+ Self-protection can be a sin. Some people protect so well that they don’t even allow God’s love to enter.
+ Fathers who control and abuse their daughters may create boundaryless women who will be abused by other men or who will become feminists who hate all authority and become an authority to themselves. Mothers who control and smother their sons may create nice boys or castrated men who are so passive that the act of leading feels like they are being mean and “not nice.”
+ Mental Illness is not THE problem. It is a signpost that points to something deeper. Some people are so quick to ignore or medicate their symptoms because they want the pain and suffering to go away. We live in a culture that sends away the messenger of pain with addictions like weed, alcohol, tobacco, sex, numbing TV series, etc. Pay attention to the CHECK ENGINE light and look under the hood. Don’t put masking tape over your engine light and ignore it.
+ All thoughts are thinkable and even “speakable” but not all thoughts are livable (loosely taken from Os Guinness, I believe). As an example, see the quote from P.D. Ouspensky above! This truth especially applies to those who believe in relativism, i.e., people who insist there is no absolute truth in our universe because there is no God. They will claim that life without a god in the universe is still fulfilling and has meaning but these words are not livable. Life without God is meaningless.
+ Men, the way to a woman’s heart is to make her feel chosen and remembered which will lead her to feel loved. Don’t put anything before her except Jesus. Women, the way to a man’s heart is to make him feel respected. Be careful how you correct him. Put nothing before him except your God.
+ The wounds inflicted by (abusive, neglectful, unaware) people can only be healed by being around other (safe) people. Unhealthy people wound but then God uses healthier people to heal those wounds. You will never heal in isolation. Learn to trust safe others.
+ Sometimes when the first few people in our lives hurt us, we construct a map in our hearts that tells us that everyone will hurt us. We might call this map an act of generalization. From one bad experience with people, we assume that all other people will be hurtful/harmful as well. Instead of protecting ourselves from a few people, we hide from everyone.
+ Beware of the culture’s focus on the brain and even the body and supplements. You live in a materialistic culture that believes the brain and body are all there is. There is no spirit. Don’t forget to see beyond the material. Your body is simply a vehicle for your spirit—important and God-created, yes, but not fully who you are. You will receive a new vehicle in heaven, so the body is special. Just don’t let the naturalistic world seduce you into forgetting the unseen—the spiritual world, the mind, the spirit, God Himself, life after death. Walk by faith and not by sight.
+ Know the culture you swim in. Most people under thirty do not clearly see and understand the world they are living in because it is all they have known. Talk to someone older for a clearer context concerning the waters you swim in.
+ Your body will age and then die. Take care of your body as the temple of the Spirit that it indeed is, but don’t obsess over it. If you do, you will overly mourn its wasting away. Live instead by the truth of 2 Corinthians 4:16-18.
+ Abortion is the gateway to hell. If you can kill innocents in the womb–God’s safe hiding place where even the God-man Jesus was formed–nothing can be protected. Nothing is safe. Anything goes. As marijuana is a gateway drug to other addictions, abortion is a dark gateway to anything and everything related to darkness, death, and hell.
+ ”Woe to those who call evil good
and good evil,
who put darkness for light
and light for darkness,
who put bitter for sweet
and sweet for bitter!
21 Woe to those who are wise in their own eyes,
and shrewd in their own sight!”
Remember the truth of Isaiah 5:20,21. People who are walking away from God will turn truth upside down. They will shout out the upside down “truth” so loudly and for so long that others (maybe even you) will doubt themselves and instead believe a lie.
+ Don’t fully trust yourself when you are hurt or angry. When you are in your emotional mind, you are capable of murder, usually not murder of the body but certainly of someone’s spirit. Murder can be verbal, or it can occur inside the secret place of your enraged heart. Go to Jesus, calm down, and wait until you are in your wise mind before you move toward others. Just don’t swallow it and be alone with it.
+ Beware of loving your pet more than people. Speaking of the culture you are swimming in, worshipping animals is a sign of the times. As people drift away from God, human exceptionalism is supplanted by humans being placed on the animal spectrum—nothing unique or distinct about them. The Imago Dei is devalued and ignored.
+ You were not born into a world at peace, but a world at war. If you are unaware of the war waging all around you, then I have news for you. Reread Ephesians 6:10ff or 2 Corinthians 10:3-5 or 1 Peter 5:6ff. Always be prepared to fight darkness with truth and in love.
+ If you have been abused by people, be careful not to protect your heart too much or without any openness. Many guard their hearts even against love and will die alone, if not physically, for sure emotionally.
+ Walk by faith and not by sight. You literally have superpowers called spiritual senses—the ability to see, hear, taste, feel, and smell on the level of the unseen. See past Batman, Spiderman, and all Marvel characters. They are digital. You are real and have in you supernatural superpowers planted in you through the new creation of 2 Corinthians 5:17.
+ Don’t shoot the messenger whether the messenger is other people or God. Own your sin. Be correctable. Be willing to own your need to grow. Ask forgiveness instead of blaming or denying.
+ Do not glorify God—because you should. Learn to love Him more as you experience His love for you. Then glorify Him because He is the most beautiful Being you have ever known.
+ Identify your vows. Vows are promises you made in the childhood furnaces of anger or intense pain or hopelessness that lead you to never let someone see your heart. Not really or not deeply.
+ Satan plants a lie in every child’s heart that they will believe until the day they die unless they identify it and dismantle it.
+ Have mercy and compassion on those around you who walk in darkness, but do not minimize the holiness of your God because of your empathy for sinners.
+ Look inside first. Always. Clean the inside of the cup, as Jesus said. I knew a woman who was always getting hurt by people and couldn’t trust anyone. I told her something that someone had told me: “When you get hurt by others you can say, ‘I can’t trust you because you hurt me’; or you can say, ‘I can’t trust myself because I get hurt easily.’” Know the wounds that make you feel hurt easily
+ There are only two things you must experience to die happy: Fill the emptiness in your soul and get rid of your badness. Only Jesus can accomplish these two things.
+ Know the difference between hurt and harm. If you don’t, you will trust no one.
+ You may not be responsible for being down. You are responsible for getting up—with God’s help. Don’t identify as a victim but grow. Life is 10% what happens to you and 90% your attitude about it.
+ Self-sufficiency is a recipe for aloneness and breakdown and even bitterness toward other people because your independence pushes them away and then you feel abandoned. Learn how to need. God created you to need Him and others. If you don’t learn how to need God and others, you will become less human every day–and more resentful.
+ You do not belong to this world. You are in the world, yes, but not of the world. Do you remember that? Has that truth changed your life? You are not home yet. Don’t live as if this world is all there is.
+ Intellectual knowledge/head knowledge is easy. Heart knowledge is difficult and fiercely opposed by darkness. Satan is fine with you knowing about God. Even the demons believe and shudder with fear. But do you know Him as your Savior and closest friend?
+ Healing, growth, and self-development are a journey. There are no microwaves in this kitchen. Be patient and trust Jesus that you are not behind as you say with Jehoshaphat, “I don’t know what to do, but my eyes are on you.”
+ Everything means something. Boredom, restlessness, ADD, being overweight, being overly thin, not sleeping well, pain in your body, feeling alone, experiencing God as far away or not hearing your prayers, Scripture feeling meaningless to you—all these point to something deeper (always rule out physical causes to bodily pain, of course). Stop and listen to what they are saying.
+ You are not built for this world only. You are built for heaven. Don’t think that your deepest longings will be fully satisfied down here.
+ If you are struggling with your identity, don’t seek to change your sexuality. Your struggle is much deeper than gender. Your struggle is with eternal spiritual things and with human relationships. Don’t settle for trying to change fleeting physical things like your body when your soul is the source of your restlessness and hunger and pain. Seek God with all your heart. Day and night. If you deny His existence, you will settle for making physical changes when a soul change is the true need. Move toward others instead of moving against your identity.
There are many truths in the universe that are part of God’s codex of healthy rules for living a meaningful life. Seek them out whether they are found directly stated in the word of God or whether they are to be discovered in the general revelation of His created universe. Truth is God’s truth wherever it is found.
Always be looking. Always be listening. Always be teachable. Avoid pride—even spiritual pride. Seek heavenly wisdom as if your life depended on it, because, truth be told, it does.
26 For consider your calling, brothers: not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. 27 But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; 28 God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, 29 so that no human being might boast in the presence of God. 30 And because of him you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption, 31 so that, as it is written, “Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord” ~ 1 Corinthians 1
