Forgive Us

How do we say we are sorry? When do we say we are sorry? Why do we say we are sorry? To whom do we say we are sorry? Are saying we are sorry and asking forgiveness the same thing? We could explore any number of possibilities related to asking forgiveness. Perhaps we should begin with what it means to ask forgiveness. According to Merriam-Webster's Online Dictionary, the word forgive means "1 a: to give up resentment of or claim to requital for b: to grant relief from payment of 2: to cease to feel resentment against (an offender) : pardon ." To forgive, then, means to release someone from something; to ask forgiveness is to ask that we be released, usually from some kind of debt.


We will probably explore the idea of debt more another time, but for now, a debt is something that we owe someone, whether the thing we owe is material or not. We can owe someone money, we can owe someone lunch, or we can owe someone the respect of acknowledging that we have in some way wronged him or her. When we ask forgiveness, then, we are asking someone to release us from whatever we owe that person--even if that person is God.

That said, then, saying "I'm sorry" is not the same as asking forgiveness. Saying "I'm sorry" is a statement; we are stating that we regret something we have done. As we explored earlier, asking places us in some way subordinate to another. If we merely state that we are sorry, we have not placed ourselves in that subordinate position. It might be argued, however, that by asserting that we are sorry we are also placing ourselves in the same kind of subordination; but, at the outset of saying "I'm sorry" is the problem: making this statement focuses on the self. When we say we are sorry, we begin with I, and that places us anywhere but subordinate to the other.


Another problem with saying "I'm sorry" is that it is akin to the ubiquitous and pointless "How are you?"--it lacks meaning because it lacks sincerity. Usually, when people ask the how-are-you question, they merely mean hello. Much has been made, in the last few years, of people (especially people working in stores) saying Happy Holidays instead of Merry Christmas; there is even a delightful song by Go Fish which addresses the substitution. Yet, the word holiday is derived from holy day, and surely Christmas is one of our most holy of days. It is, once again, all about about intentions. I can say "Happy Holidays" and intend just as much (or more) reverence and respect as anyone saying "Merry Christmas."


Just so, I can honestly care about he response to my asking "How are you?"--and I can sincerely mean it when I say "I'm sorry." However, all of these phrases begin to lose their meaning because we use them so much and so loosely. Just as the word love, in English, begins to fade because we use it interchangeably to express our feelings about our spouse, our deity, and our pizza, so does "I'm sorry" begin to lose its meaning as we use it to address forgetting to convey a phone message, losing our temper, or running over the cat.


Asking forgiveness pushes us to be more specific. Saying "I'm sorry" allows us an immediate distance between what we did and to whom we did it. We have tried to teach our kids to ask forgiveness according to a formula (which we stole from someone. I do not recall who; being teachers means we adopt and adapt ideas from pretty much any source we encounter--it's one of the teacher skills most teacher education programs don't address). The formula for asking forgiveness is really pretty simple: [Address the person by name while looking him or her in the eye], please forgive me for [state specifically what you have done to wrong the person you are talking to]. Do not make excuses. You may offer to make amends in some way if that is appropriate. Then listen to the other person. After it is over, it is over.

By asking forgiveness in this way, we are connecting ourselves to the action which precipitated the need for forgiveness and also to the person harmed. Until we take hold of the thing, how can we let it go? We have to accept the thing we have done, admit it (to others and to ourselves) before we can begin to seek forgiveness. But we also have to connect ourselves to the other party; we have to acknowledge that there is another party--which is something the I'm-sorry statement does not accomplish.

Knowing the words to say means nothing (ultimately) if the intention is not true and sincere. I have had dozens of students who know what to say and when to say it; their manners have been impeccable. Yet they are like the Eddie Haskell character on Leave It to Beaver: what they say with their mouths and what they say with their hearts are very different things. The Eddie Haskell effect results in empty words and unfulfilled expectations. We might fool someone occasionally, but we will certainly not fool God; most often, we merely fool ourselves.

I have a very bad habit, when it comes to prayer (and habit within prayer, it could be argued, is a problem in itself) of inserting a plea which says, "Forgive me, Father, for my short-comings and failures," with the implication that God can sort it all out--He knows what I did and He can fill in the blanks. And God could do that, though I am not sure that He wants it that way. By not being specific, I am, in effect, creating space-holders with the words short-comings and failures. They become the x of my quadratic equations of asking forgiveness. I am saying that I do not have the time or the interest to actually establish what I am talking about. Maybe I am too ashamed to voice my sins; maybe I am just trying to cover all my bases; but most likely, I am being too lazy, too irresponsible, too removed. Even though I may have addressed God directly, I have not addressed anything else directly, and so I have left a void.

Someone might object that the Lord's Prayer is not so specific: Christ prays "forgive us our debts," which is no more specific than my short-comings and failures. However, as we have already observed, Christ is modeling how we should pray. When I am teaching students how to write, whether it be an essay or a poem, I have to be careful--students have a tendancy to embrace the model I provide to the point that they cannot begin to write their own piece. They make my model into a template that they try to fit their own words into; they refuse to see the model in more abstract terms. Christ could not anticipate all our "debts" that we might include in the prayer. (Well, okay, He could, but you know what I mean.) It is up to us to fit ourselves into the model. Just as my students must realize that it is possible to have six paragraphs in an essay (I had a college freshman argue, once upon a time, that he could not insert another paragraph into his essay because his high school English teacher had told him that essays had to have five paragraphs), we must all realize that we can--and we must--make our prayer personal and specific and real. That is part of the debt.

Our Daily Bread

Human beings have needs, wants, and desires. We are programmed to seek out the things we need, and we are conditioned to seek out the things we want and desire (and we shall explore the difference between want and desire later). One of the biggest problems we make for ourselves is our inability (or reluctance) to differentiate between need and the other two conditions. We decide, consciously or not, that the things we want (or desire) are needs.


Whether or not we accept Sigmund Freud's ideas about the human psyche (and he has greatly fallen out of favor in psychology circles), his basic ideas still resonate with some kind of truth. According to Freud's theory of the psyche, we each have three parts of our mind: the conscious part, called the ego, which is the rational part, the part that makes decisions; the id, the subconscious, innate part that communicates our needs to the ego; and the superego, the subconscious part that communicates with the ego about issues of right and wrong (this part, according to the theory, is learned, as opposed to the id, which is standard equipment on most models). The needs the id conveys to the ego are those things necessary for survival; Abraham Maslow, a later generation psychologist, identified these in his hierarchy of needs, with food, water, shelter, and sleep as the most basic needs for our survival as individuals (with sex included as a necessary thing for our survival as a species--individually, we can go our whole lives without it, but if everyone were to abstain, the human race would cease to exist).


The thing I like about this idea (aside from certain applications in literary analysis--the theory works really well in analyzing Lord of the Flies), is that is helps us identify the basics we need for survival; although Maslow would disagree with me about this, I am going to say that everything beyond that, then, becomes a want or a desire. Needs, for our purposes then, are those things we have to have in order to continue to exist: water, food, sleep, and shelter (protection from the elements). Wants and desires are those things beyond the needs.


The difference between want and desire is a matter of degree. Both suggest that we have a motivation toward acquiring a thing, tangible or intangible, but desire suggests a stronger motivation, either because of the level of the want or because of the nature of the want. To understand the former: we might want a snack (whether we or not we actually need to eat), but we might desire chocolate--the want is much more intense. To understand the latter: we might want to talk to that little red-haired girl (if we are Charlie Brown), but we might desire Jessica Rabbit (I will let each of you figure it out for yourself)--sexual attraction is usually a stronger motivation than many other feelings (for better and for worse). Upon reflection, desire seems to be a hybrid of need and want--desire applies to those things related to basic survival needs (like food), but not truly necessary for our existence (e.g., chocolate and sex--as we discussed earlier). Of course, all of this is merely semantics, but most of us do discern a difference between want and desire, and for our purposes we need (or perhaps want or desire would be more appropriate) to establish this difference.


We are instructed to ask for our daily bread. We might interpret this as the Bread of Life: we are to ask for Christ to be in our lives daily, and we can achieve this connection through prayer, through reading the Bible, through living as Christ would. This reading of the text makes much sense and furthers our understanding of how we can apply the Prayer to our daily lives. However, we can also read the text literally, that we are to ask for our daily bread, the food we need to survive. I wish to explore that reading of the text for a bit.

Bread is the staff of life; that is, bread is a staple, a most elemental of necessities. With it, we can exist. Without it, we must find something to take its place so that we can continue to exist. Prisoners, at least the cartoon variety, are relegated to a diet of bread and water, the bare minimum for sustenance. We talk about our money in terms of the stuff--bread and dough. But we seem wired to respond to bread in more than visceral ways; perhaps this is a learned response, but most of us havc very strong feelings about bread. Most of us cannot withstand the aroma of fresh-baked bread. Being Southern, I have a thing about biscuits (with or without gravy); my wife, a Yankee and three-fourths German, has a similar thing about rye bread. We all, for the most part, love bread. However, most of us would probably not wish to be placed in the cartoon prisoner's situation of having nothing else besides the bread, even though that is all we might need. And that is the point.

We need the bread to survive. We ask God to provide our daily bread, meaning we ask God to give us that which we need to continue to exist. The prayer does not say give us our daily tuna steak or our daily asparagus or our daily flan; we are to ask for the basics--we should be content and thankful for those basics. But we, all too often, get confused about things, we mix up need with want or desire, and we feel slighted, deprived, if we do not receive our wants and desires. There is nothing wrong with having wants or desires (within the parameters of our beliefs--we are not to want a thing that is someone else's and we are not to desire sex outside our marriage), but we have to see these things for what they are, that they are beyond our needs. We have to move beyond our sense of entitlement, the idea that God owes us.

Most of us in our society are blessed abundantly. We have a home, we have food, we have potable water, we have clothing. These are the necessities. These are the things we need to exist. Most of us have so much beyond this: we have cars, we have electronics, we have furniture, we have toys, we have books, we have tools. Most of us have jobs and places to worship and places to play. And most of us take all this for granted. We are so acclimated to this way of living that we cannot see how it might be different. It is difficult for us to imagine not having our luxuries; it is nearly impossible for us to imagine not having our necessities.

I read stories as a part of my job, and a good deal of literature allows us to encounter characters who find themselves having to make do with bare essentials. Holocaust literature, such as Elie Wiesel's Night and Art Spiegelman's Maus, describes the horrors of life without the necessities; my students and I read the words, and we can identify the concept of doing without food or shelter or sleep, but we cannot begin to comprehend in any kind of real way what the authors are communicating. Our culture is truly blessed in so many ways. Even those in our country who have the least among us have opportunities for the necessities that others in other countries do not have. I am not trivializing the situation of anyone in America who is homeless or who has little; I am merely stating the fact that even those who have nothing have avenues of opportunity for meeting their basic needs.

Most of us need to realize what it is we need and what it is we want or desire, and I use the word need intentionally--we find ourselves in a place that requires we identify those things that we have to have and those things that are extras. I am not suggesting that God does not want us to have anything beyond the necessities, but I believe He would want us to know the difference. We need a place to shelter us from the elements, but we can want a place that has certain amenities--a certain number of bathrooms, a certain kitchen layout, a bedroom for each child, a place for a garden. We need clothes to protect us from the elements, but we can want a certain brand of shoe, a certain style of dress, a particular color of shirt. With all needs, we can want for certain things, but we must realize that having the needs met is a huge blessing in itself, whether we get the flavor or the style we want or not.

This Day

The Prayer says "Give us this day our daily bread. . . ." So again we are reminded to focus on the now. We can also take a chunk of the passage out of context: "Give us this day. . . ." I like the quote this way because it changes the object of the verb without (in my mind) changing the true meaning of the passage. We are still focusing on this day; better, we are moved beyond the material things we ask for, the bread, and seem to be asking for the day. We are petitioning God for a day--for time and for all the possibilities each day holds.



When I was around junior-high age, I had a patch on a pair of blue jeans: Today is the first day of the rest of your life. Ersatz hippy child that I might have been, I did not truly grasp the meaning of that iron-on mantra. It was cool, and that was enough for me at the time. Yet now, I begin to see capital-T truth hidden in those words: each day is a new beginning, each day is a chance to start fresh, a chance to take control of our lives--yet we rarely do so, perhaps because we do not know how.



Most of us claim we want to achieve this kind of new beginning: we make plans, we make lists, we vow and pledge and promise; but, we never get around to doing anything because we do not know exactly what it is we have to do. To take control of our lives, as Christians, we have to surrender our lives. Seize the day, then, is not about grabbing hold; it is about letting go. This is counter-intuitive to our way of thinking. There is a Zen-ness to the path we are to choose, a less-is-more way of approaching life that is alien to our culture.



If we truly wish for God to give us this day, we must realize that we are submitting to God and that this day is His day. For many of us, the point of having the day is to do with it as we wish. We want the day for furthering our agenda: we want to achieve success in our job, we want a good day with our family, we want to catch our limit of small-mouth bass, we want our garden to grow, we want to take a nap. None of these things are bad, of course, but we always seem to want to jump straight to what we want. We have to understand that the day is God's, and only through Him can we find what we desire--and often that thing is outside our scope. If we turn the day over to God, if we acknowledge that it is His, then we often discover things that we did not know we wanted. (Not unlike a small child who opens a birthday gift and exclaims, "It's just what I always wanted and I never even knew it!")



When we ask for the day, we need to grasp, not the day itself, but its potential. God blesses us with each day, and if we submit the day--and by extension, ourselves--to God, we will be amazed at the things that will happen.



I am not suggesting that God is somehow trying to trick us, or even that this is some kind of cosmic test, that by not giving the day back to God we fail and do not pass Go, do not collect $200. That kind of thinking trivializes God and His blessings. What I am suggesting is that our day becomes enriched when we offer it back to God. The blessings of the Holy Spirit infuse our days when we recognize that they are, after all, not ours. And the wondrous thing is that all those things we wanted in the first place can still be ours: we can be successful at our jobs, we can have good times with our families, we can do those things we had wanted to do. But now we are able to put them into perspective, now they have focus.



Okay, so we do, indeed, seize the day. What do we do with it? Ask ten people at random, "If you had a day, what would you do with it?" I have no idea what kind of answers you might get--it all depends on whom you ask. I know some people who would love a day to try to get caught up--on work, on little jobs around the house, on laundry, on gossip, on watching everything stuffed in the DVR. Others would want a day to spend on a hobby--scrapbooking, gardening, cooking, fishing, eating. Some might want a day to devote to prayer, others might enjoy a full day of doing absolutely nothing. We are all different, and we all have different wants, needs, and desires.



But what might be more interesting would be to ask people, after they have had a "free" day, "How did you spend it?" I am fairly certain that many of us would express some degree of regret about what we did with our day: "I wasted the whole day running endless errands." "I veged out in front of the tv and ate junk food all day." "I had every intention of getting something done, but it never happened." Not every person will feel this way, but it happens often enough to be noted. I believe this regret stems from our sense of missing something: we are aware, on some level, that something is amiss, that something we need is not where it should be. We are missing God's presence--not that He is not there but that we have not invited Him into our life by acknowledging that the day is His. God is, as we have explored earlier, always there (no matter where there is); however, God has given us the ability to accept or reject Him--and ignoring Him is a kind of rejection.

When we invite God into our life by acknowledging Him, by giving Him the day, we might end up doing exactly the same kind of thing as we would have done anyway--we might vege out in front of the television or take a nap or never get around to the one thing we had planned to do. Then again, if we put our day into focus through God, we are more likely to do something productive with the day--but even if we do not manage to do that, we will not experience the regret of having wasted the day as we other might have done. We should be able to see how our day fits into God's day: rest is not a bad thing, is a very necessary thing, and sometimes we have to take time out just to maintain our sanity (or something like it). By giving the day to God, by allowing Him to guide our decisions, we surrender the need to feel guilty and we are better able to put everything into perspective.

God rewards us for allowing Him to have His day, and ultimately we receive just what we originally asked for: Give us this day.

Give Us

We often hear preachers (and others) invoke the analogy of God as vending machine, an image that is supposed to--and should--repulse us, make us ashamed, give us pause. Our culture is immersed in a gimme mentality. We are spoiled little kids, expecting that we will be given whatever we ask--if we ask often enough and effect the whining attitude most appropriate for the particular situation. Some clergy attack this attitude full force, condemning those of us who indulge in the asking. Others, however, embrace the asking, claiming it as our right (much like a child spending his inheritance before the passing of his parents). These clergy, and their followers, argue that we have the right to expect whatever we want. These folks incur the full ire of those who take the previous attitude, both camps claiming divine right.


We have to ask, though, how can it be so terrible to ask if it is in the prayer we are to model? It is, as in so many other things, a matter of moderation--it is all perspective and degree. We have to remember, this is Christ modeling for us the way we are to pray: this is part of our instruction in how to be Christian--how to be Christ-like. God wants us to ask because asking puts us in our place. We tend to get it all backward (which is one of our more endearing qualities as human beings): asking does not put us in control; asking places us in submission.


Give us, then, is a request--not a demand and not an order. By asking, we are, in essence, admitting that we cannot do it on our own. Asking means that we need God--something we tend to forget in our independence-is-everything culture. We divide things into two categories: those things we think we can do on our own and those things for which we admit we need God. In actuality, there is only one category, for without God we can do nothing, whether we admit it or not.


The Medieval world view had a place for everything and the expectation fo everything to be in its place--they called this idea the Great Chain of Being, a hierarchy of all things: God at the top, followed by the trinal triplicity of angels (three sets of three kinds of angels each, each with its own position and function), which was followed by man, then the animals, then vegetables, and finally minerals. Within each category was its own hierarchy; for example, the animals were ranked from the lion, the most perfect animal to the medieval way of thinking, down to the lowliest animal, the worm. Medieval scholars created elaborate tomes, called bestiaries, listing all the known animals in the proper places.


Even man was divided and listed according to place, with man superior to woman and royalty superior to peasant. I am not suggesting we adopt the medieval mindset of taxonomy for looking at our world, except that God is above (and beyond) all things. God, in the medieval milieu, was seen as superior to all creation, man included. Our culture embraces the idea of equality and egalitarianism to the point of thinking that there are no divisions: children think they are equal with parents, students think they have the same rights as teachers, beginning employees believe they should be paid the same as twenty-year veterans. And some of us--though we might never admit it, even to ourselves--see ourselves on par with God.


We live in a culture in which many authority figures wish to escape the perceived stigma of being the authority figure. Some parents and teachers attempt to establish themselves as friends--non-threatening buddies who can be trusted, who never have to reprimand or discipline anyone about anything, who are fun and hip and cool. These adults evidently believe they are helping the kids in their care. They seem to think that with all parties on the same level, no one will feel bad, everyone will rise to the highest expectations, and we will all live happily ever after. I think they are either too lazy or too insecure to function as they should in their roles. More significantly, though, is that the kids in the care of such so-called adults want what they do not have.

It might be argued that these kids want what they do not have merely because they are kids and they are doing what kids do--rebeling by nature. However, I have taught some of these kids, the ones whose parents treat them as equals or whose teachers in other classes try to be the kids' friends. (I often have to admonish student teachers about not falling into the mire of trying to be the students' friend.) These kids all want to have someone set boundaries, someone to watch over them, someone to be in charge. Perhaps it is only my experience, but it seems that kids have a natural need to have the authority figures in their lives: they need the security and the structure inherent in the traditional parent-child and teacher-student relationships. We, also, have that kind of need. We need God.

Our asking God for things--whether it be bread or shelter or health or guidance--shows that we need God, and God wants it that way. He wants us to need Him. He wants us to ask Him. He wants us to realize our place in His kingdom, and that place is in submission to Him. We might get the things without asking--many people have bread and all kinds of other things without ever asking for them. The point, though, is not the getting; it is the asking. By asking, we are acknowledging God's place in our lives. By asking, we are accepting our place in God's kingdom. By asking, we become more aware of our relationship with God.

In Heaven

We have already visited this phrase, but as I have worked toward this point, a song from many years ago has begun haunting my musings. I have always enjoyed movies, and when I was in graduate school, I spent many hours (possibly too many) at the Kentucky Theater. At that time, the Kentucky had a repertory schedule, showing a variety of movies each week; the offerings included classic movies, independent films, foreign films, and art-house fare. Admission was cheap, compared to the first-run cineplex theaters, and the ambiance was comforting--the Kentucky is a beautiful place, a theater built in the 1920s and maintained very nicely during its years in downtown Lexington. It was at the Kentucky that I first encountered the film Eraserhead, by David Lynch. Eraserhead is a black-and-white nightmare of images and symbols, and it works successfully on several levels. One of the iconic images from the film (for me, at least), is the Lady in the Radiator (played by Laurel Near): the protagonist lives in an apartment with old radiators that clank and whistle, and--in the midst of his surreal life--the Lady in the Radiator appears, singing a song entitled "In Heaven." So I have found myself humming this as this chapter approached.

The song, like so many other things in this film, is very simple and very repetitive. The Lady in the Radiator sings, "In Heaven, everything is fine. In Heaven, everything is fine. You've got your good things. And I've got mine." Not exactly hymn material. I think the reason I have this stuck in my head, aside from the fact that there is nothing much else up there to crowd it out, is that speaks to an all-too-common perception we have about heaven--and by association, about God.

Heaven, for many of us, is all about fluffy clouds and harps, wings, and halos; for others, it is streets of gold and mansions. We--because we are human and cannot help ourselves--put everything in human terms. We cannot begin to imagine heaven, so we conjure up images to which we can relate. And that is okay unless we let this begin to seep into our relationship with God. Putting our human spin on heaven makes it material, a thing, because that is how we tend to think. By extension, though, we sometimes begin to skew our relationship with God into something that is all about things. We trivialize God.

The other disturbing thing about the song stuck in my head is the idea buried in the second part of the lyrics: "You've got your good things. And I've got mine." On the surface, this appears pretty much an innocent thing; but, what troubles me is that not only does it suggest that heaven is about things but that we are separate, isolated. I do not like that it becomes, in a way, an us-and-them thing (here, a you-and-me thing). My personal bias is that heaven is much more about solidarity. I guess I am infusing my own humanness into the idea. I want to make heaven into something about family and relationships and connections, and that probably runs just as much a risk of being wrong as if I made it about rainbows and fields of flowers.

I think I am bringing it back to the idea we discussed earlier, about heaven in our daily lives, and I see relationships as integral to that. We have to reach out to others. We have to embrace our brothers and sisters; we have to accept the people in our lives; we have to touch the hearts of others so that we can be better connected to God. In my world-view, connecting to God requires connecting with His children--and that is heaven.

As it is

The first thing that comes to mind is status quo. But as humans, we are rarely satisfied with the way things are--we are always striving toward some new milestone. Why? Because on some level we know this is not as good as it gets--there is more, and we want that. But, the question will surely come, isn't wanting more a bad thing? And, of course, the answer cannot be a simple yes or no. It depends on what we want, it depends on why we want it, and it depends on how we want it.


What we want can, as we have observed earlier, help to define who we are. Wanting lots of money and wanting world peace are two different things. Wanting goods and wanting good are very different. We live in a culture that values things, where bumper stickers (He who dies with the most toys wins) reflect the hearts (and minds) of many of us. Our culture embraces the material things and denigrates the spiritual things, to the point that a bracelet can take the place of the thing it is supposed to symbolize. I am thinking of the Lance Armstrong LiveStrong bracelets and the Madonna-inspired wearing of the red string associated with the Cabala. I am not saying that the original bracelets were meaningless; I am saying that many people wear these articles without any thought as to the true meaning behind the thing. Without having our hearts in the right place, the thing remains a thing and has none of the symbolic meaning we might assume it has. A flag is just a piece of cloth unless we recognize the ideas and ideals of the country it represents.


So, we have to be careful about what we want. Does this mean that we cannot want material things? Of course not (and this is not another Material Girl allusion). We need certain things because we are built that way: food, water, shelter. These are needs, and the difference between needs and wants is important. We need food, water, and shelter to exist; we do not need caviar, artisian spring water, and a mansion. I often hear students (and adults) say they need a thing--a new cell phone, a new television, a new car. This is where we have to be careful. We are assured that God will provide those things we need, but we are not told that we can have every little thing our hearts desire.


Does this mean that wanting things is, after all, bad? I think that leads to the other two questions. First, why do we want the thing? Is our want rooted in greed or envy? Are we coveting the thing because we desperately want to keep up with our neighbors (or the other soccer moms or the folks in the next pew or that guy we saw on TV)? If I want a new mini-van so that I can more safely transport my family and, at the same time, get better gas mileage, is that wrong? I hope not, but we still have to be careful. I might want a computer that will allow me to effectively and efficiently take care of my meager computing needs--word processing, browsing the Internet, converting my albums to mp3s--but when I walk into a computer store (even virtually), I may have to fight against the urge to go overboard, buying a machine that far out-strips my needs (thereby far out-stripping my budget). Again, it becomes a matter of perspective. We have to prioritize, and in so doing we have to remember that God comes first. This perspective should help us keep our wants under control.


This brings us to the third question--how do we want it? Where I live it would not be uncommon to hear someone say that he wants something bad--meaning that he wants it badly or that he wants it very much. I think, though, that the misuse of an adjective for an adverb might allow us some insight into what I mean about how we want things. We have all probably heard someone say that he (or she) would do anything to get a particular goal. I have had students who said they would do anything for an A. Some people might do anything for a hard-to-get concert ticket or a particular car or to live in a certain neighborhood. Rarely do any of these people mean that they would literally do anything (I hope). But it gets at the crux of how we want things. If we want something with all our hearts, we run the risk of squeezing out something that is vitally important and already set up there: God. Wanting something to the point that the desire becomes all-consuming upsets our priorities and places us in danger.

Another (related) issue is that we just don't always know what it is we want. We feel that we are missing something, so we try to fill it or fix it on our own. In our culture, we are bombarded with possibilities to fill every need, every want, every second of every day. Not all of these possibilities are good. Like food choices when we think we might be hungry, the things we are offered by our culture are not all equally nutritious or wholesome. Just as we might be tempted to indulge in a bag of chips when we are bored and alone on a lazy afternoon or just as we might think we need the carton of ice cream at midnight, we often find ourselves making choices about what we think we want merely because those things seem right or seem easy or seem desirable. We cannot allow forces outside ourselves to dictate our desires. This does not mean shutting God out; if we are God's children, if we have accepted Christ, then God is not something outside of ourselves. Our wants, our desires, will more easily and naturally conform to God's will.


Does this mean we will always want in the way God would want us to? Will we always behave the way we should in God's eyes? No. We are still human. But, if we acknowledge God's place in our hearts, it should help us.

A somewhat separate issue, perhaps, is the difference between having what we want and wanting what we have. In Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Alice encounters a similar dilemma at the tea party with the March Hare and the Mad Hatter:

The Hatter opened his eyes very wide on hearing this; but all he said was, "Why is a raven like a writing-desk?"
"Come, we shall have some fun now!" thought Alice. "I'm glad they've begun asking riddles. — I believe I can guess that," she added aloud.
"Do you mean that you think you can find out the answer to it?" said the March Hare.
"Exactly so," said Alice.
"Then you should say what you mean," the March Hare went on.
"I do," Alice hastily replied; "at least--at least I mean what I say--that's the same thing, you know."
"Not the same thing a bit!" said the Hatter. "You might just as well say that 'I see what I eat' is the same thing as 'I eat what I see'!"
"You might just as well say," added the March Hare, "that 'I like what I get' is the same thing as 'I get what I like'!"
"You might just as well say," added the Dormouse, who seemed to be talking in his sleep, "that 'I breathe when I sleep' is the same thing as 'I sleep when I breathe'!"

Aside from the semantic entanglements of this Wonderland exchange, we encounter a different and more important kind of entanglement--a conundrum more philosophical than philological: we have a tendency to make associations that are not truly there and, probably just as often, make separations that we should not. We, like Alice, often confuse meaning what we say with saying what we mean; however, we do not as often see that there should be a more positive correlation between having what we want and wanting what we have. Wanting more, especially in the non-material sense (spiritually, emotionally), is part of who and what we are--we cannot escape it because we are constantly striving toward Christ and Christ-likeness. However, we still have to appreciate what we have. We should not ignore the relationship we have in favor of the relationship we want to have; we should not refuse the feelings we have now because we think the feelings to come will be better. It all comes down to what we do with what we have. We have to embrace the good things we have, appreciate them, use them--all the while striving toward something more.

In many ways this is like the difference between happiness and joy: happiness is ephemeral, an emotion that is fleeting, temporary; joy is eternal. We should not ignore happiness just because we know that joy is forever. Happiness is good, and we should embrace our moments of happiness, however fleeting they might be. Happiness may leave us, but it leaves us with memories and it strengthens our hearts, our minds, our spirits; it helps us and enriches us. We need to find the balance between accepting what we have and striving to improve.