On Monday, we talked about how persistence is worth the trouble when it’s based on our values. The things that matter to us are worth the effort. The trouble is that many of us live our lives either unsure what our values are or constantly sacrificing our more important values for less important ones.
A while back, I crawled off of a long-haul international flight, into bed, and then right back out into a 6-hour meeting I was forced to attend for work that was meant to help me discover what my values were. Jetlagged, cagey, and crabby, I was not happy about being forced into 6 hours of serious introspection. In this workshop, we had to make timelines of the most significant events in our lives, reflect deeply on our “calling,” and answer small group questions to refine what really matters to us. In that moment, what actually mattered to me was sleep. Crabby and tired though I was, it was interesting to see that one unique value of mine emerged anyway—apparently, I really care about people who are grieving the death of someone close. Even if I’m half-awake and cursing the Wright brothers for inventing air travel, I still care about people who are going through the excruciating pain of losing someone they care about. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs states that you can only think about more refined concepts once you’ve satisfied your basic physical needs like food, water, sleep, and shelter. If something matters to you more than those things, it really matters to you. It’s a value. For most of us, there’s a bit of a gap between what we think we should value and what we really value. Our actual values are revealed by how we spend time, money, and mental energy. To get really meta about this, the fact that I crawled into the six-hour meeting in my beleaguered state shows that I value keeping my appointments more than I care about keeping my brain and body happy. I’m not saying this level of commitment is always a bad thing, but if I live my entire life making those kinds of choices, my body is in for a rough ride. Commitment isn’t a bad value, but I need to teach myself to care about my body, too. These days, quite a few people are taking advantage of the social distancing time to clarify what their values really are. With slightly fewer distractions around, there’s more space to think about what really matters to each of us in this life. So if you have not already done this, or are open to repeating the process, here are some questions to get you started: What are you passionate about? My senior pastor asks me this so often it’s nearly annoying, but it’s a good question. If absolutely nothing immediately pops into your mind, it could be a sign of burnout or depression. There’s little room for passion when you’re in survival mode, and you may need to tend to more basic needs before embarking on this particular quest if that’s where you are. What makes you angry? Anger is a fabulous indicator of values because we only get mad about stuff we care about. If you’re never angry, you don’t care about anything. Even God gets angry. Think back to the last time you were really angry about something. What about the situation angered you? That anger reveals your values, for better or for worse. What would you do if you didn’t need to work to survive? The connection between our paying work and physical survival can mask what matters to us because naturally, physical survival matters a lot. The values we have outside of physical survival become more apparent when we consider a world in which that is not so worrisome. I love the song “If I Were a Rich Man” from Fiddler on the Roof because it shows us what matters to Tevye—making a good life for his wife and cultivating a deeper relationship with God (as well as, of course, a few more shallow concerns like being well-respected in the community and having a higher status). If you could have everything that money could buy, what would still engage your interest without the high stakes of survival? What makes you anxious? Anxiety reveals two things: that you care what happens to something and that you’re not sure what will happen. No one gets anxious about complete certainties. If the anxiety is centered around something inevitable (like death or taxes), it’s not actually about the event itself but our own ability to deal with it. It’s normal, for example, to be anxious about death if you’ve actually had a brush with death in the form of mortal peril, losing a loved one, or receiving bad news from the doctor. If you worry about death a lot just because it’s out there and will get you sometime, look deeper. Why does it worry you? It could be people you care about, plans you have for the future, or even salvation anxiety. These things are more interesting to look at from the perspective of values than the universal fear of death. If you want to skip the self-interrogation, of course you can just write names of values on slips of paper and arrange them into a list by order of importance. Either way, this is a process of getting to know yourself in a way that the ordinary hustle and bustle of life doesn’t ordinarily allow. It’s worth doing, though, so that when life gets busy again you can make choices based on what actually matters to you, rather than what most easily hooks your attention. Your values will shift in order of importance, so if you haven’t done this in a while, check in with yourself again. Life is too short to waste.
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AuthorJillian Lutes is the youth pastor at West Covina Hills Seventh-day Adventist Church. Archives
May 2020
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