Turning the other cheek vs. being a pushover: What’s the difference?
I only have a second before I need to dash out to another event as part of my WEEK OF EPIC SOCIALIZING, so I thought I’d let you do all the hard work today and give me the answer to a question that’s perplexed me for a while:
What is the different between being Christ-like and being a pushover?
Here’s why I ask:
I am an extremely nonconfrontational person. To a fault. I mean, if I walked out to my car and witnessed someone run a key down the paint, slash all the tires and break all the windows, I probably would just say, “Hey, what are you doing?” (Phrasing it as a question, since, you never know, he might have a good reason for his actions!) Even if he responded by saying that he was just destroying my car for fun, I would probably just nod, perhaps letting a vague look of mild disapproval cross my face. Heck, if I got on my phone to call a tow truck, I’d probably worry about seeming impolite.
Given this temperament, it’s easy for me to convince myself that I’m just a really saintly, other-cheek-turning kind of person on occasions when I let others’ transgressions go. “Just trying to imitate the Lord!” I assure myself…but in reality I’m just doing what’s easiest for me. For example, the other day I’d been waiting in a line for quite a while, and a woman cut right in front of me. It was pretty clear from her body language that this was intentional. It was one of the most blatantly unfair, infuriating actions I’ve witnessed in a long time. My temper flared, so I said, “Oh — heh-heh — um, hey, I, uhh…” and she promptly turned away from me and made a call on her cell phone. I never did say anything, and, sure enough, she got served after waiting only a couple of moments, whereas my wait was extended even further.
As I walked away from the situation, I assured myself that that was the Christian thing to do. I was a living testament to Matthew 5:39! Maybe this lady was stressed and in a hurry, and I made her day a little easier by letting her cut in front of me in line. But something didn’t feel right about that conclusion. Maybe some small part of my motive in giving her a pass was Christ-centered, but mostly it was Jen’s-fear-of-confrontation-centered. And while I do know that we Christians are supposed to love our enemies and not seek vengeance out of anger, surely there is some line that can be crossed where you’re just a pushover. Right?
I really don’t know. So I turn the question over to you:
Is there such a thing as being a Christian pushover, or should we always let it go when people wrong us? If there is a boundary between being Christ-like and being a wimp, where do you draw that line?
I look forward to hearing your thoughts.
How I pray when I don’t have time to pray
There’s nothing like daily prayer time. Over and over again, I’ve found that when I make the necessary sacrifices to structure my schedule around prayer (instead of vice versa), my small efforts are repaid tenfold by the tremendous graces I receive.
But I can’t always get there. I usually blame it on not having time, though that excuse is a little suspect since I always manage to find abundant time to mess around on the internet. Anyway, whether it’s due to laziness, fatigue, a lack of faith, being overwhelmed, truly not having time, or some combination of all of the above, there are seasons when regular prayer time just doesn’t happen.
With my personality type, there’s a temptation to let that mean no prayer at all: I am the master at letting perfection be the enemy of the good, not doing anything at all if I can’t do it the “right” way. When I let this happen, it’s always detrimental to my spiritual life. Though I do try to “pray without ceasing,” offering up my actions throughout the day to God, it has not been my experience that that is a substitute for dedicated time spent focusing exclusively on the Lord. As my spiritual director always pointed out, prayer is about building a relationship. Praying as I do my work is like when my husband and I work alongside each other managing the household chaos: that’s a wonderful, necessary part of maintaining a healthy relationship, but if we never spent any time alone, our relationship would suffer.
So I’ve found it to be extremely important to make sure that I’m getting some dedicated prayer time in on a somewhat regular basis, even if it’s not quite as much as I’d like. The most helpful advice I’ve ever come across in this department is from Fr. Michael Scanlan’s book Appointment with God (which is out of print now, but I ordered a copy by phone from the Franciscan University Bookstore). The book is full of great advice about taking your prayer life to the next level, but the biggest thing I took away from it was the idea of making prayer appointments.
Fr. Scanlan points out that when we want to make sure we meet up with someone, we don’t just say, “Yeah, I’ll see you sometime.” Rather, we name a specific time and place the meeting will occur, which allows us to protect that time from getting displaced by our busy schedules.
I already had a routine where each Sunday I’d sit down and write out my weekly schedule, transferring whatever is on my Google Calendar to my handy day planner from Faith Calendars. After reading Fr. Scanlan’s book, I added a new element to this routine: I’d write down my appointments with God too. I’d take a moment to prayerfully think about when and how I should pray this week, then note that time on my calendar. Some weeks I might feel called to step it up and include serious prayer time every day; other weeks I might feel like just once or twice would be about all I could realistically handle. Not only do I note the time I’m going to pray, but the type of prayer as well (e.g. Gospel reflection, Rosary, silent meditation, etc.)
The process is actually fun! I might feel moved to get up early on Tuesday to pray a full Rosary at 6:30, to reflect on the Gospels at 2:30 PM on Thursday, and to wrap up the week with some Bible reading at 10:00 on Friday night. It’s always interesting to see how much of what type of prayer I feel moved to include that week. And when these “appointments” are written on my calendar, I actually tend to keep them.
This idea has really helped me keep my prayer life from fizzling out altogether when I’m in phases where daily prayer time isn’t happening. What are your tips for carving out time for prayer during busy seasons of life?
The goal-oriented life
It was my husband who first introduced me to the concept of goal orientation. Before I met him, that kind of thing was completely foreign to me. I lived my life drifting from one whim to the next, with only fleeting thoughts as to how my actions today would impact my life as a whole. Occasionally I might come up with some random idea about what I wanted in the future (e.g. to make a certain amount of money, or to have a certain title on my business card) but even then I didn’t take the time to reflect on whether this goal was truly the best thing I could do with the limited time I have here on earth.
I never sat down and put serious thought into questions like, What kind of person do I want to be? At the end of my life, what do I want to have accomplished?
When I first met my husband, I marveled at what he’d been able to accomplish in his life. He’d grown up poor, raised by a single mother who hadn’t had the opportunity to get an education beyond high school, and yet he ended up with degrees from Yale, Columbia and Stanford. On top of his degrees, he’d traveled the world, knew all sorts of fascinating people, and had a career he enjoyed. Though I may not have phrased it this way at the time, I wondered how he was able to live such a great story.
When I asked him about this, his answer was simple: It’s all about knowing the goal.
It seems that for some people, like my husband and his mother, goal orientation comes naturally. They’re always thinking about the big picture, making sure their actions right now are building towards their larger vision of what they want their lives to be like. For others of us…not so much. We tend to live down in the weeds, staring at the trees, never considering the forest. Darwin recently had a great post on this subject, in which he analogized living without goals to building a structure without an architect. He writes:
The house or office you are sitting in was built according to a plan and a purpose, a purpose from which it is now only able to deviate to a limited extent. My house cannot suddenly become an office tower, though it has an office in it. My office building would make a very poor house. But they are built knowingly, according to a plan. And yet, our lives seem often constructed to a purpose without the architect knowing that he is in constructing something with walls and doors — an edifice which will suit some ends well, and other poorly. Individual choices pile up unto some particular type of life, and once that life is built people sometimes find it is not, in fact, the kind of structure they want to live.
When we got married, my husband and I carefully considered what kind of life we wanted to live, and set goals accordingly. For me, it was a completely new way to live. Suddenly choices that once seemed difficult were crystal clear. An underlying sense of aimlessness was replaced with the feeling that my daily actions were adding up to something larger; like I was creating something great, one choice at a time.
Needless to say, our priorities have radically changed since our conversions, but I find that living a goal-oriented life is no less important now than it was then — in fact, I think it’s more important now. Having goals is always important for success, whether you define “success” as having a certain dollar amount in your bank account, or becoming a saint. Living a life dedicated to God requires no less focus and intentional effort than living a life dedicated to worldly achievements.
Today, our goals look something like this:
- Love and serve God to the very best of our abilities, and inspire our children to do the same
- Have a strong, happy marriage
- Have a close relationship with our children, so our family is their home base (i.e. so they’re not peer-oriented)
- Have enough financial stability so that our family can be comfortable
- Put down roots in one area so that we can build a sense of community with our extended family, our church, and our neighbors
…And so on. For an example of how this helps us in daily life:
A few weeks ago I had one of those moments when I felt like the walls were closing in on me, and I announced that I wanted a bigger house. Our house is less than 2,000 sq. ft., and has three small bedrooms — pretty big by historical standards, but, compared to the suburban Texas standard of living, sometimes it feels pretty small with five kids. My husband and I sat down to discuss the possibility of getting a little more space. A more expensive house wasn’t exactly in the budget…but we could probably find some lender who would approve us for a loan…and he might be able to take on some extra work at the office to cover the increase in expenses.
In my old way of thinking, I would have wanted to do it. The whim of the moment led me to want a bigger house, so I would have pushed forward to make it happen. But when I considered this possibility in light of our family goals, it became clear that that would be a bad move: Having my husband be stuck at the office even more hours per week just to pay for a bigger house would go against priorities #2 and #3, and would probably negatively impact #1 as well. We decided against it, and the small sacrifice of staying in our current digs left me with that satisfying feeling — which is still relatively new to me — that this one action was building toward something bigger. Without goals, my individual choices were like stones tossed into a pond; now, it’s as if they’re stacked together purposefully, to build something beautiful.
Having clear goals for our family is invaluable in big life decisions, but helps in the little choices of daily life as well. It doesn’t mean that everything always works out perfectly, but it’s like having a family compass: We may get off track once in a while, but we always know where true north lies.
Living an awesome story
A good nickname for me would be “Inertia,” because, like the dictionary definition of the word, I tend to “exist in a state of rest or uniform motion in a straight line, unless that state is changed by an external force.”
If my choice is accepting an invitation to go to an interesting social event or continuing to sit in front of my computer, I’ll choose the latter. If I had an idea for a new way to decorate the living room, I wouldn’t do it, even if I had the time or money. In other words, left to my own devices, I tend to do nothing.
As usual, it almost always comes down to fear. I have this personality quirk where I’m always worried about doing the wrong thing and screwing something up, so I find it easier to avoid change, even if it means missing out on good opportunities. (This is also one of the reasons I have such trouble with decision making in general; if I order a cheeseburger at a restaurant, for example, I’m immediately plagued with the thought, WHAT IF I SHOULD HAVE ORDERED THE SHRIMP INSTEAD?!?! Yeah. It’s hard to be me.)
Anyway, I’ve had this tendency my whole life. But then, earlier this year I discovered a book. And everything changed.
It started when Brandon Vogt left this comment to my post asking for book recommendations. He raved about Donald Miller’s memoir A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, listing all the changes he and his family had made after Miller’s book had prompted them to wonder how they could turn their life into a great story (which now has included building a computer lab in Africa). Intrigued, I read the book.
It begins with Miller stuck in a funk after writing his smash bestseller, Blue Like Jazz. He’d written a couple of other books that didn’t do so well, and his life was at a standstill. Then he got a call from some producers who wanted to make a movie out of Blue Like Jazz; and since it was a memoir, that means they’d be making a movie of his life. A Million Miles in a Thousand Years is the chronicle of what he learned in the process. Two guys named Steve and Ben came out to write the screenplay with him, and in one of the book’s first scenes, Steve mentions that they’ll need to take some liberties with his story in order to make it a good movie. Don asked why they couldn’t just use the facts of his real life. Steve replies:
Steve sat thoughtfully and collected his ideas. He scratched his chin and collected some sympathy. “In a pure story,” he said like a professor, “there is a purpose in every scene, in every line of dialogue. A movie is going somewhere.”
That last line rang in my ear like an accusation. I felt defensive, as though the scenes in my life weren’t going anywhere. I mean, I knew they weren’t going anywhere, but it didn’t seem okay for someone else to say it. I didn’t say anything; I tried to think about the philosophy of making movies so my face would look like I was thinking about something other than the fact that Steve didn’t think my life was going anywhere.
This prompted him to start asking: What does a great story look like? What would my life look like if it were an amazing story? He writes:
In creating the fictional Don, I was creating the person I wanted to be, the person worth telling stories about. It never occurred to me that I could re-create my own story, my real life story, but in an evolution I had moved toward a better me. I was creating someone I could live through, the person I’d be if I redrew the world, a character that was me but flesh and soul other. And flesh and soul better too.
He learns a lot about what it means to live a great story, but the lesson that most resonated with me was the one about fear. There’s never been an Academy Award winning movie about someone who lived his life cowering in fear, never taking action because he’s worried about messing something up.
The great stories go to the ones who don’t give in to fear.
The most often repeated commandment in the Bible is “Do not fear.” It’s in there over two hundred times. That means a couple of things, if you think about it. It means we are going to be afraid, and it means we shouldn’t let fear boss us around. Before I realized we were supposed to fight fear, I thought of fear as a subtle suggestion in our subconscious designed to keep us safe, or more important, keep us from getting humiliated. And I guess it serves that purpose. But fear isn’t only a guide to keep us safe; it’s also a manipulative emotion that can trick us into living a boring life.
This was a profound insight for me. Reading of Don’s metamorphosis from couch potato to a risk-taking man of action inspired me to do the same in my own life. My decision-making flowchart used to begin with the question, Is there any risk involved? And if I could imagine the slightest thing that could go wrong, I usually wouldn’t do it. Now I begin with the question, Would it make a good story? And if the answer is yes, I usually do it.
Obviously, asking ourselves if it would make a good story is not the only litmus test we should use for decision-making. We need to consider if it’s prudent, if it’s God’s will, etc. And, as Brandon points out in one of his (excellent) posts on the book, we need to make sure we’re living our story with God, not seeing him as an uninterested editor. But incorporating that question into my thought process has changed my life. Stories inevitably contain both ups and downs, challenges as well as triumphs, and thinking of it this way has helped me get over my fear of making mistakes. Rather than thinking of a risk that didn’t pay off as the end of the world, I now see it as just another part of the story.
Don Miller rewrote his life story by searching for his father and asking a cute girl he barely knew to hike the Inca Trail with him in Peru. What would it look like for me, a suburban housewife with five young kids, to live a great story?
I’ve started saying yes to more social invitations. When I’m pretty sure God is calling me to do something, I just do it, without the usual detour down Overanalysis Lane that leads me to talk myself out of it. I’m less likely to decide to do something out of guilt alone, so I’m better at saying no when I need to. Ironically, it’s made me take myself less seriously (in a good way), since thinking of the events of my life as part of a grander story helps put them all in perspective.
What I learned from this book was to not let fear hold me back; to think big; to expand the scope of what I believe it’s possible for one person to accomplish. I’ve learned to put 100% of myself into every moment, and to let go of worries about whether everything will turn out perfectly.
At the end of the book, Miller talks about a great movie he once saw about a real football team. To his surprise, the screenwriters chose to cover the year they almost won the state championship game, rather than the year they did win it. The screenwriters understood that that year they lost was the better story, because that was the time the team had tried hardest and sacrificed most. As Miller points out: It’s not necessary to win for the story to be great; it’s only necessary to sacrifice everything.