Maybe True Joy Comes From Surrendering Our Dreams Rather Than Reaching Them
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(OPINION) Going into this column, I realize two things:
First, many of you likely will disagree with me, and reasonably so.
Second, the virtue I’m about to expound on is one I’m incapable of living up to myself. If there ever was a case of “do as I say and not as I do,” you’re about to read it here.
Given these two negatives, feel free to take everything I say with a grain of salt.
But I think I’m right.
I’ve long wrestled with the principle of practicing selflessness rather than selfishness.
I’ve considered this periodically for decades. What brought it to my mind again was a tribute to the late minister Tim Keller that I happened across. It was written by journalist David Brooks shortly after Keller died in 2023.
Brooks said Keller “offered a radically different way. He pointed people to Jesus, and through Jesus’ example to a life of self-sacrificial service. That may seem unrealistic; doesn’t the world run on self-interest? But Tim and his wife, Kathy, wrote a wonderful book, ‘The Meaning of Marriage,’ which in effect argued that self-sacrificial love is actually the only practical way to get what you really hunger for.”
According to Brooks, the Kellers noted that after being married a while, you’re going to realize your spouse is selfish. Meanwhile, your spouse is realizing the same thing about you.
“The only way forward,” Brooks continued, “is to recognize that your own selfishness is the only selfishness you can control; your self-centeredness is the problem here. Love is an action, not just an emotion, and the marriage will only thrive if both people in it make daily sacrificial commitments to each other, learning to serve and, harder still, be served. ‘Whether we are husband or wife,’ the Kellers wrote, ‘we are not to live for ourselves but for the other. And that is the hardest yet single most important function of being a husband or a wife in marriage.’”
But my subject isn’t marriage per se, or even marriage mainly.
Yes, the teachings of Jesus and the New Testament generally call us to lay down our life and our own preferences or ambitions for our spouse, which is hard.
What’s terrifying is that they also call us to lay down our life for everyone, family and strangers alike. Saints and sinners alike. The appreciative and unappreciative.
To find lasting peace, they say, we need to surrender our egos and our rights and learn to live for God and other people. The counter-weight, the promise, is that if we voluntarily empty ourselves, we may find ourselves fulfilled beyond our wildest imaginings.
It’s one of those countless paradoxes found in the Christian gospel.
“For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and for the gospel will save it,” Jesus says in Mark’s Gospel. In the next chapter: “If anyone wants to be first, he must be the last of all and the servant of all.”
This goes on, ad infinitum.
You see the problem, of course.
If any idea runs counter to our 21st century Western ethos, it’s that we should give up our own comfort, dreams and preferences for a bunch of yahoos who probably won’t even have the decency to appreciate what we’ve done, much less reciprocate.
I mean, why would we do that? Isn’t that just being weak-willed? Won’t we become doormats — because of our unwillingness to stand up for ourselves? Don’t we need healthy boundaries to protect ourselves?
Perhaps.
But I suspect Jesus might point out that for many of us, a lack of boundaries isn’t our biggest issue. Many of us — I’m looking in the mirror — are just one big old, gigantic boundary. We block out anybody who’s too needy or intrusive or otherwise irritating. We hardly let anybody in. We don’t want anybody “bothering” us with their needs.
Other questions arise. Where does sacrificing end and enabling the irresponsible begin? Isn’t it possible that by endlessly serving we’ll just burn ourselves out?
Again, legitimate questions. As humans, whatever we do, we’re apt to get it wrong some of the time. If it’s worth doing, we’ll do it to excess.
Plus, friends, let me tell you from my own constant failings, living that Jesus kind of life is hard. It’s risky. It can be deeply frustrating. It requires more faith than I possess.
Why would anybody do it?
Probably because we finally come to realize that selflessness brings a freedom self-seeking can never match. That’s another paradox. The harder we strive to give ourselves everything we crave, the more miserable we tend to become. The maw is never filled.
The more of ourselves we give away, the more of our soul we open up for God to satisfy.
“Tim’s happy and generous manner was based on the conviction that we are born wired to seek delight, and we can find it” Brooks wrote of Keller. “‘Anybody who has tasted the reality of God knows anything is worth losing for this,’ Tim preached, ‘and nothing is worth keeping if I’m going to lose this.’”
What if our boundaries, our self-protection, our self-serving are blocking us from the greatest delights and blessings of our lives?
Paul Prather has been a rural Pentecostal pastor in Kentucky for more than 40 years. Also a journalist, he was The Lexington Herald-Leader’s staff religion writer in the 1990s, before leaving to devote his full time to the ministry. He now writes a regular column about faith and religion for the Herald-Leader, where this column first appeared. Prather’s written four books. You can email him at pratpd@yahoo.com.