Goals

Are Good Deeds Their Own Reward?

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I wrote last week about John Piper’s book Desiring God and said that I had just started reading it and was excited about its ideas.  I’ve been chewing over it–a better description than “reading it”–and realizing more and more how much it would have helped me back when I was a college student and struggling with the question of what God wanted me to do with my life.  But hey–I’m still struggling with that question.  So it’s still helpful.

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Can “Serial” Add to Your Happiness?

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image from Serial website

Just in case you don’t know what “Serial” is:

In 1999 an 18-year-old Baltimore girl named Hae Min Lee was murdered and her body found in a park not far from her high school.  Her ex-boyfriend, a Pakistani Muslim named Adnan Syed, was arrested and charged with the murder; no other suspect was ever considered.  The first trial ended in a mistrial; the second trial ended in a guilty verdict and Syed has been incarcerated in a supermax prison ever since.  A family friend and lawyer tried to get attention paid to the poor job done by the defense and the many inconsistencies in witness testimony, but she was unsuccessful in her efforts until she decided to try bringing the story to the media in some way.  She contacted a journalist named Sarah Koenig who became interested and ended up doing a 12-part podcast on the case, titled “Serial.”  This series exploded in popularity, with 68 million downloads on iTunes alone.

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Life Lessons from a Chef

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Chef pressing fingers to her templesAre you a fan of the PBS TV show “A Chef’s Life“?  Lots of people are.  The star of the series is Vivian Howard, a young woman who is immensely talented in the kitchen but who is also immensely talented in front of the camera.  (That’s not actually a picture of her.  I’m very wary of posting pictures of celebrities without permission.)  I’m sure that part of her popularity comes from her willingness to be filmed in the midst of  various crises, where she often does not maintain her cool.  She also often says something that I say:  “What was I thinking?”  She’ll come up with a menu for some big event and then realize that she has put herself and her long-suffering staff on the spot, trying to make and plate some menu item that is completely impractical given the situation.  It all seems completely genuine and unstaged, and I believe that it is.  I am typically very sympathetic to the fixes she lands herself in, and she doesn’t have the option that I have of deciding at some point to cut an item or two.  If it’s on the menu or the program, she has to do it, no matter what.

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A Happiness Paradox

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If I plan ahead for an event and am able to relax and enjoy it, I’m sorry when it’s all over.  If I procrastinate and have lots of last-minute anxiety, it’s a tremendous relief to have the event behind me.  These strange feelings have become especially obvious to me as I’ve looked back on the retreat breakfasts I’ve overseen this year for my wonderful chorale.  (But we still have one more concert, and therefore one more Friday-night reception for me to agonize over.)

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Where’s My Reward?

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I’m concentrating right now on building happiness by establishing good habits within the limits of my character.  This emphasis has grown out of Gretchen Rubin’s new book that I wrote about yesterday.  I’ve been sharing my struggles to put accountability structures in place that will work with my obliger tendency, but I’m realizing that for some habits I’m just going to have to use some other prod or prods.  I’ll be writing about these ideas over the next posts.  I love putting my mind to a problem and finding a solution once I realize that there is a problem.

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Plans are worthless . . .

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. . but planning is everything.

This saying is attributed to Dwight D. Eisenhower, and to be honest it didn’t make sense to me at first.  Plans almost always go awry in some way, but that’s not the same as saying that plans are useless.

Substitute the word “preparation” for “planning” and the meaning becomes much clearer.  I was reminded as I worked on this post of a talk I heard many years ago at an educational conference by Dr. Jerry Tetreau.  He was speaking about the importance of being prepared to teach, using the Latin word praeparō, meaning “to make ready in advance.”  If you’re prepared, then a change in plans won’t throw you.  And there are always changes in plans, no matter how well thought out they may be.

Back in the mid-1970’s I saw a great illustration of this principle.  A fellow graduate student was doing her speech recital, a dramatic presentation on Catherine Booth, the wife of William F. Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army.  There she was, up on stage all by herself, costumed in a cape and hat, when suddenly something started flying around the stage.  She kept going.  Eventually, I think, the critter disappeared, but she never missed a beat, and she finished the recital to great applause.  Know what it was?  A bat.  How would you ever plan for such a thing?  The truth is, you wouldn’t.  You couldn’t.  You could only prepare.

Further small thoughts . . .

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. . . on the importance of small things!

I quote here an example given many years ago by Sparky Pritchard, then an associate pastor at my church.  He was talking specifically about Bible study, but this analogy could apply in many areas:

Sometimes people ask what they should do when they don’t feel like reading the Bible, or don’t feel as if they’re getting anything out of it.  I tell them that you don’t always enjoy it.  Sometimes your Bible study time is like taking your vitamins:  totally unexciting, but you know it’s good for you.  Other times your experience may be more like eating a bowl of cold cereal:  It’s nourishing and somewhat tasty, but not all that great.  But then you experience the Bible as if it’s peaches and cream.  Here’s the thing, though:  you never get to that dessert stage without being willing to go through the vitamins stage.  In other words, you have to be consistent:  do the (seemingly) small thing of being in the Word daily.

Just as I said a couple of days ago:  the small series of faithful actions adds up.

There is no elevator to success . . .

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 . . . you have to take the stairs!

This anonymous proverb embodies the rather timeworn idea that there are no shortcuts to achieving a goal; you have to get there step by step.  We all know that isn’t true 100% of the time; once in a great while there’s a so-called “overnight” success.  (Including, I guess, viral videos.)

I’ve been thinking for some time that there seems to be a paradox about what produces achievement.  The boring, repetitive actions, followed consistently day after day, tend to produce great results, while the dramatic actions often produce . . . nothing much.

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The only person I can change . . .

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. . . is myself.

Just one more day of the old year.  I think my only resolution should be to remember that I can only make resolutions for myself.   I want to set the very highest standards for myself but refuse to apply those standards to others, to remind myself that people are (or at least may be) doing the best that they can, to carry out the description of love in I Corinthians 13:5:  “It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.”  As I’ve said many, many times, I am the Queen of Grudge-Holders.  If I concentrated on just that italicized phrase all year I’d be much easier to live with.  (“If thou, O Lord, shouldest mark iniquity, who should stand?”)

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Just Go Ahead . . .

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. . . and finish the job!

This picture is of a small portion of laundry that I was folding this morning, and I was reminded of how I used to do this.  First I would dump the laundry on the bed.  Then I would let it marinate for awhile.  Then it would be bedtime, so I’d have to scoop it back into the basket.  (Jim calls this activity “exercising the laundry.”)  Then it might go back and forth a couple more times.  Then I’d go through it and sort it out into everyone’s pile.  Then, and only then, would I finally fold it all up and put it away.  What a waste of time!  At some point I realized that all I really needed to do was to just start folding and put the things in piles as I folded them.  Huh.  What a concept.  If you have a job you don’t want to do, why add extra steps to make it even harder?  But that’s what (some of us) weird humans do.  Pretty silly!