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07: The Life You Love Manifesto|A Life of Service [Podcast]

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This is the last installment of a 7 part series on Creating the Life You Love.  Today we’re talking about the  pinnacle of what it means to live a happy and fulfilled life—living a life for others.  Hope you’ll tune in and if it’s helpful for you I hope you’ll share it with your friends.  Much love!!

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I forgot to include this in the podcast but it’s one of my favorite quotes of all time, reminding us that we get what we want by giving it away!

“Your real, new self (which is Christ’s and also yours, and yours just because it is His) will not come as long as you are looking for it. It will come when you are looking for Him. Does that sound strange? The same principle holds, you know, for more everyday matters. Even in social life, you will never make a good impression on other people until you stop thinking about what sort of impression you are making. Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it. The principle runs through all life from top to bottom. Give up yourself, and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it. Submit to death, death of your ambitions and favourite wishes every day and death of your whole body in the end. Submit with every fibre of your being, and you will find eternal life. Keep back nothing. Nothing that you have not given away will be really yours. Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead. Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.”
― C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

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“Love is holy because it is like grace–the worthiness of its object is never really what matters.” Marilynne Robinson

Show Notes

What are the ways you can love the people in your life?

1.  Stop pretending.   Take baby steps toward living in your own skin.  Stop holding back.  Love with your whole heart and stop counting the cost.

“I’m writing this in part to tell you that if you ever wonder what you’ve done in your life, and everyone does wonder sooner or later, you have been God’s grace to me, a miracle, something more than a miracle.

2. Stop waiting and hiding.  You think it’ll be easier to live this way at some designated point in the future when you get your life together.  That point is very allusive and probably not a reality for most of us.

3. Start small and start  today.  Do the next thing you can do to love and serve the people around you.  Make a meal.  Sit and talk.  Do the laundry.  Serving your people well is not about one act of giant heroism, it’s about a thousand little ordinary acts of love and kindness.

Resources and Links

06: The Life You Love Manifesto|A Life of Rest [Podcast]

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This is part 6 of a 7 part podcast series on Creating the Life You Love.  You can find the previous episodes here!

Summer is a great time to talk about our need for rest.  We live crazy busy lives and often don’t realize the toll it’s taking on us until it’s too late.  I hope this episode on rest will encourage you to make time for activities that fill you up instead of deplete you.  Learn to live your life with more margin for your health and well being and for the sake of those you love the most.  I address physical, mental, and spiritual rest and give some practical tips on making space in your life for the people and things you love the most!  Hope you enjoy!

Or click here to listen.

Show Notes

  • What true rest is not and what’s at stake if we don’t cultivate this virtue
  • The basis of rest is worship
  • Rest is a gift that must be received

3 Ways to RECEIVE rest

1) Physical Rest—Get more actual sleep.  Go to bed earlier SANS electronics.  Vigorous exercise helps.  Natural Calm helps.  Getting up early helps.

When we really let our minds rest contemplatively on a rose in a bud, on a child at play, on a divine mystery, we are rested and quickened as though by a dreamless sleep.  Or as the Book of Job says, “God giveth songs in the night” (Job 35:10) Moreover, it has always been a pious belief that God sends his good gifts and his blessings in sleep.  And in the same way his great, imperishable intuitions visit a man in his moments of leisure.  It is in these silent and receptive moments that the soul of man is sometimes visited by the awareness of what holds the world together.” ~Josef Pieper

2) Mental Rest—Cull what you can from your life that is causing you the most stress.

3) Spiritual Rest—God invented rest.  It was His idea and He gives us the gift of rest in Him.

Resources and Links

I’d love to know your tricks for making space in your life for the best things.

 

05: The Life You Love Manifesto|A Life of Gratitude & Abundance [Podcast]

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“Gratitude is the heart’s memory.”  old French proverb

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Notes from the Show

1. Gratitude is God’s gift to you—The key to gratitude is not in our giving thanks.  It is a gift from God that He first bestows on you in Baptism and continues to nurture in you through His word and the Lord’s Supper.  The word means undeserved favor, so even in the very meaning of the word, we see that this is not something we can do.  It is a gift from God that we can receive and in faith cultivate by partaking of His gifts.

2. Gratitude is intimately connected to suffering—Before Christ can offer the gift, the eucharisteo to us, He must suffer and die.  Suffering has always been inextricably intertwined in the life of believers.

3. Gratitude is trusting that what Christ has given is more than enough—The raw material of our lives  in unchangeable.  We can’t undo the fact that we’ve been hurt, that we’ve sinned, that we continue to sin.  We can’t go back.  The Lord gives His ultimate gift to us, Himself, in the Lord’s Supper, taken from the word Eucharist, which means literally true gift.  In the Eucharist, or the  eucharisteo, in Christ’s ultimate gift to us, He goes back for us, and make right all the mess of our past.

Resources and Links

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04: The Life You Love Manifesto|A Life of Faith [Podcast]

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This is part 4 of the 7 part journey toward Creating the Life You Love and this week’s focus is a Life of Faith.

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I think this will be different than almost anything you could listen to on this subject.  I hope you’ll give this episode a listen because these may be some of the most encouraging words I’ve ever spoken.  This is not a guilt trip.  This is not a  list of what you should be doing as a believer.  This is for those of us who never seem to measure up to our own ideal of spirituality.  This is a reset button for your struggles and your doubts in your faith life.

You can also click here to and listen.

The absolute most important book on Christian spirituality in my life has been Grace Upon Grace by John Kleinig.  PLEASE consider adding it to your library.  You will hang on every word. You will wish you had read it ten years ago.  You will read it over and over again. [Read more…] about 04: The Life You Love Manifesto|A Life of Faith [Podcast]

02: The Life You Love Manifesto|A Life of Learning [Podcast]

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Show Notes and Outline

Why should we want to be lifelong learners?

  • It cultivates virtue, curiosity, and empathy.
  • It’s one of the best gifts you can give yourself and those around you.
  • It reassures us we are not alone!
  • It strengthens our ability to think for ourselves amid a world of chaos and distraction.

Neil Postman is a critic of modern culture with its endless quest for entertainment and distraction.  He makes a compelling case for finding ways to swim against the grain and continue reading and learning.

He says that George Orwell taught us to fear the tyranny from without with his chilling, dark vision in the book 1984.  He claimed that the roots of liberal democracy would be overcome by an external force and terror.    But 1984 came and went and our way of life had survived.  Neil Postman  points out that perhaps we had forgotten another,  no-less chilling,  prediction by Aldous Huxley in Brave New World.  Postman says, ” Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley’s vision, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.”  His book Amusing Ourselves to Death  is hard to read without seeing the writing on the wall.  We are being weakened by our constant desire for entertainment.

“What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.”  In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we desire will ruin us.” (Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death)

The statistics are pretty staggering.  The average American, over the age of 2, watches around 40 hours of  TV per week.  That’s a full time job.  And if I’m not guilty of the TV portion, then certainly my “screen time” is no less staggering.  We have shifted from an word centered to an image centered culture and the only way I know to protect my self and my family from the tyranny of constant entertainment is to instill in them (and myself) a love for the written word.  As Ray Bradbury says, “You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.”

Books are powerful and life-changing, but they are demanding and require more from us than we’ve been accustomed to giving.  Developing a life-long habit of reading will not be easy and you will most certainly swim upstream in our culture to do it. But it’s worth it.  There is no better gift that you can give yourself and your children than the desire and ability to read great books.

How can we become lifelong learners?

Here’s a few tips on how to start.

  1. Start with Neil Postman’s book Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business.  I don’t know if I’ve ever read a more compelling book on the state of our current culture and its obsession with entertainment.  You will be inspired to turn off the TV and the computer and pick up a book.
  2. Begin a reading plan that is doable.  Commit to 15 minutes a day and do it at the start of your day.  I try to start and end my day with books, even if it’s only a few minutes.  When I first began a serious reading program, I followed Susan Wise Bauer’s The Well-Educated Mind: A Guide to the Classical Education You Never Had.  It gives suggestions on a reading plan, with  specific classic books, that all educated adults should read.
  3. Don’t be too hard on yourself.  Reading is a serious, demanding endeavor.  It’s like exercise, but for your mind.  You won’t be able to run a marathon the first six months.  Start our slow, but keep going.  Consider starting a book club with a few like-minded folks. And remember, “In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you.”  (Mortimer Adler)
  4. I don’t agree that it doesn’t matter what you read as long as you read.  It does.  A lifetime of romance novels will likely not change your life.  But, Plato and Homer and Faulkner and C.S. Lewis might.  Here’s some inspiration to get your started.  Also, try this list of the 10 Books Every Christian Should Read. And remember, “It is what you read when you don’t have to that determines what you will be when you can’t help it.” (Oscar Wilde)
  5. Start a reading group (even if it’s just one other person) so you can discuss what you’re reading.  I also LOVE to listen to free lectures on books I’ve read or am reading.

There are countless lists of the must read books.  I decided to view as if I were gonna be stranded on a deserted island.  So, here’s the 25 books I would choose if I could only read 25 for the rest of my life.

25 Must Read Books

  1. Lutheran Study Bible
  2. The Odyssey, Homer
  3. The Aeneid, Virgil
  4. Mere Christianity , C.S. Lewis
  5. Hamlet, William Shakespeare
  6. The Divine Comedy, Dante
  7. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
  8. The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky
  9. Paradise Lost, John Milton
  10. Orthodoxy, G.K. Chesterton
  11. Lilith, George MacDonald
  12. Candide, Voltaire
  13. The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkein
  14. Gone With the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
  15. Beloved, Tony Morrison
  16. All the Pretty Horses, Cormac McCarthy
  17. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
  18. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
  19. East of Eden, John Steinbeck
  20. Middlemarch, George Eliot
  21. That Hideous Strength, C.S. Lewis
  22. The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner
  23. Peace Like a River, Leif Enger
  24. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard
  25. Jayber Crow, Wendell Berry

Links and Resources

This is the 2nd part of a 7 part series on creating a life you love.  You can listen to part 1 on Calling and Vocation and then tune in next week for part 3!

 

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Now, it’s your turn!

I’d love to know how you incorporate reading and lifelong learning into your schedule?

What are the barriers for you?
What questions do you have?

What are a few titles that would make your top 25 books list?

(I know, I forgot poetry.  This list totally stressed me out!)