If We’re Going To Be Intentional…

Intentional. Purposeful. Pick your synonym, but those are big buzz words right now. For whatever reason, we as a culture have chosen to condense very large concepts down into a quick way of communicating those concepts with one word: intentional.

Short nuance: This is going to be a post that can be taken for more than what I intend it to be. For the sake of clarity, let me bluntly say that my goal is that what I am trying to process through is the use of words. Now, back to intentional.

The weakness of being intentional

How can I communicate in a way that packs the most meaning into the shortest amount of time, but also in a concise way? I honestly believe there are good intentions behind the use of words like this, but it personally makes me feel as if I’m a project or a focus plan. That is a tension I don’t always resolve well. It can make a more intimate relationship feel corporate, cold and love-less. Whether real or perceived, those feelings exist. I realize that we are not to be driven by our feelings. I get that. However, when that notion drives aside all feelings for how I should be intentionally acting (and it starts to actually be acting the longer it isn’t healthfully dealt with), it takes on further the corporate and cold aspect. People are thirsty and hurting because none of us escape a world in which sin in or around us exists. Approaching that with tools that behave like a Gallup poll engagement survey are not going bring deliverance from the thirst or hurt that is likely the root of the behavior.

Being intentional can even have the opposite affect not by what is motivating our intentionality, but by the condensing of those motivations to the point where they’ve become buzzwords and lost meaning. It was in jest, but I was meeting with a friend last year and he said to me, “Are you being intentional with me right now?” This is a relationship I want to grow, but like a bad seed in a bag of otherwise good ones, the cultural use of being intentional can introduce a lack of trust like weeds. It can even make someone feel like you’ve been assigned to them. Whether that is real or perceived, if you’re wanting to build a relationship, I don’t see that as fruitful in a positive way. We’ll get back to perception in a minute.

Jesus, please help me.

A conversation Jesus has with one of the religious leaders, recorded in the Gospel of Mark, fuels what I believe is the way to address being intentional.

28 And one of the scribes came up and heard them disputing with one another, and seeing that he answered them well, asked him, “Which commandment is the most important of all?”
29 Jesus answered, “The most important is, ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one.
30 And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’
31 The second is this: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.”
32 And the scribe said to him, “You are right, Teacher. You have truly said that he is one, and there is no other besides him.
33 And to love him with all the heart and with all the understanding and with all the strength, and to love one’s neighbor as oneself, is much more than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices.”
34 And when Jesus saw that he answered wisely, he said to him, “You are not far from the kingdom of God.” And after that no one dared to ask him any more questions. – Mark 12:28-34

“But, but, I am loving my neighbor!”

It takes two to communicate. If you’ve been alive for any length of time, it’s not an uncommon occurrence that the message that’s been received is not the one you intended to send out. It has been said that perceptions are reality, and while that’s note entirely true, it feels like it. There is a responsibility of love on the hearer, on those who receive your intentionality, to believe the best about you. 1 Corinthians 13:7 says that Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. This is a characteristic of what love does.

But what of the one who is is trying to love? Or… are you trying to be intentional? 1 Corinthians 13 starts with If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing. You may as well say that if I am being intentional but have no love, it’s worthless.

If we’re going to be intentional…

Lets shift focus. Intentionality focused on where I spend my time and what I feed myself on is self-driven. Unless I’m trying to work for the approval of someone else, It’s unlikely I’m going to make myself feel like a project. When I act out of intentionality instead of an outpouring of what I am loving, the conviction is lost. People feel like projects. This may be a crude way of saying that, but I don’t know how to refine it better.

What did Jesus say? Everything is summed up by love God, and secondly love others. The order I believe is incredibly important. If we are going to be intentional, let us be intentional about loving God. If you are a Christian, I hope you know that the separation between you and God has been reconciled by Jesus. You aren’t reading the Bible and praying to gain anyone favor. Haven’t we heard it said that Christianity isn’t a religion, it’s a relationship? (That’s not to say Christianity is NOT true religion, but that is another discussion.) You are trying to grow your relationship with the God who has rescued you. Who IS this God that would leave heaven to become a man, take on our sufferings, die for the ways his creation has dismissed and shunned him, and raise again so that we could be set free from the curse that enslaves us all? All out of love, amazing love. This love is worth the intentional effort to understand. Even more, it is worth fanning the flame of your affections. Yes, Jesus came and lived and suffered and died and rose again to glorify and love his Father, but he he also fulfilled the second greatest commandment, to love his neighbor. To love his people. His affection was set on his Father, and his Bride.

Affection, I believe, is what feels lacking from a saturated use of being intentional. If we’re going to be intentional, let it be to the stirring up of our affections for God and one another. If whatever way we are behaving is quenching those affections, that’s worth starving.

How can I fan the flames of my affection towards God and the people around me? How can I pour gasoline on that fire? How can I increase that intensity? Is what I’m doing genuinely stirring up those affections or having the opposite effect?

Hope

I’m not one who gets this right all the time. I quench my affections for God, my family, my friends, those who aren’t my friends, all the time. My faith cannot be in how well I respond, though, because my response will be inconsistent at best this side of eternity. My faith has to be in the One who died to reconcile me God, because I sure can’t close that gap on my own. Still, with the Valley of Vision, we pray: Grant that I may never trust my heart, depend upon any past experiences, magnify any present resolutions, but be strong in the grace of Jesus: that I may know how to obtain relief from a guilty conscience without feeling reconciled to my imperfections.

A final thought inspired by Treebeard

If we are wanting to love God and love others, and I’m proposing that our use of words is getting in the way of that, I also believe JRR Tolkien gives us some wisdom worth considering. In the spirit of the age of 2018, we are into quick fixes and hacks. We want to say hello, maybe go so far as to drop an encouraging word on someone, and move on. It’s like we live our lives out of the office the same way we do in the office, acknowledging the people we constantly pass in the hallway but don’t stop because we have other things we need to be busy with. Slowing down may be culturally celebrated, but I am suspect of it being culturally practiced. Before I digress into some other tangent about that, I mentioned Treebeard from Lord of the Rings. In The Two Towers, he is having a conversation with two hobbits in regards to his name.

I am not going to tell you my name, not yet at any rate.’ A queer half-knowing, half-humorous look came with a green flicker into his eyes. ‘For one thing it would take a long while: my name is growing all the time, and I’ve lived a very long, long time; so my name is like a story. Real names tell you the story of things they belong to in my language, in the Old Entish as you might say. It is a lovely language, but it takes a very long time saying anything in it, because we do not say anything in it, unless it is worth taking a long time to say, and to listen to.

What is the relevance? If we are loving God and loving others, I believe we can do better than trying to capture big affections with shorthand buzzwords. God and people are valuable. We can can intentionally think about which words we use, we can give each other the best of our words, and we can love each other enough to take a long time to say that.

This is far from completely fleshed out here in a blog post, but I hope it inspires some thought and consideration. I need that myself.

Face to Face

Some things have been rattling around in my mind over the last few weeks. I’m just trying to figure some of this life and myself out. You could look at this as a sneak peak into the internal thought process of analysis and decision making.

I need the Lord. Desperately. Subtly, I feel I’ve gone in a “just me and Jesus” direction. I may be on the verge of coming out of that, but it remains to be seen at this point. One of the ways the Lord makes himself known is through his Bride, the Church. The Holy Spirit ministers to his Bride through his Bride. Through fellowship. Relationships with other believers is more important and life-giving that I’ve given a credit for this year. I feel it’s easy to say bitterness has rot my posture toward the church.

Face-to-face time. This has been front and center at my attention over the past couple weeks. Not that I focus on it, really, but that it keeps popping up in conversations, podcasts, blog posts, sermons, etc. Relationships cannot grow, they cannot thrive without face-to-face time. This can be derailed in lots of ways. How much face to screen time takes away from face-to-face time? How many conversations that could knit two people closer together are lost for the sake of eavesdropping into someone else’s online drama or someone else’s white washed social media? Or just shopping and consuming? I don’t want to come to a place where I reject technology, but rather I want to start asking the question, “How can I harness this technology to where it enhances face-to-face time instead of creating a void in the relationship?” This will likely be a balance I will never achieve, but I must never cease to aim for it.

Time. I’m a finite creature. My capacity is only so high before things I engage in begin to suffer and I make halfhearted investments in others. Time is a limited resource, and one I will never get back. When it’s wasted, I feel the seeds of bitterness beginning to root.

When I say yes to something, I say no to something. This is where God, the church, relationships, face-to-face time, and stewardship all come together. What will I say yes to? Bitterness? Laziness? Anger? Prayer? Relationships? The Lord? My wife? My children? If I say yes to staring at my phone or some other screen beyond appropriateness, I say no to play and story time with the kids, board games, deep conversations, honest and open and lighthearted and laugh-filled and scary and fearful conversations? Just some examples. I have several behaviors that I need to change.

Who will I invest in? Who will have access to me? I realize that may sound cold, but I have to be realistic about my capacity.

My wife and kids will have the greatest access to me. This is going to mean they do not get crowded out by others, who will have lesser degrees of access. This has to start at home and branch out from there. Texting, email, social media, etc. Those screen time conversations that can enhance face-to-face time need to take a backseat to my own family. However this has to be the expectation set with the relationships I’m in.

I need the Lord. 

“Unless the Lord builds the house, those who build it labor in vain. Unless the Lord watches over the city, the watchman stays awake in vain.”

Psalm 127:1 ESV

My wife. 
My children. 
My fellowship of believers. 
My family.
Everyone else.

Fellowship of believers. Those relationships in the church by whom the Holy Spirit minister’s and the father reveals himself. Few are long-term friends, and there are several who are in what I’ve been calling an “ember” stage of friendship. I feel what it looks like, as far as setting expectations, is to tell those closest and ember and beyond relationships my struggle to spend time with the Lord and face-to-face. To explain to them the enhance/void dynamic of technology, and that means I may be spotty in response to them because I’m trying to invest in my family. They will have higher access that most, but not above my wife and the kids. I must be pursuing the Lord above all. I guess this blog post will serve that purpose to those who will slog through it to this point. There may be times my excess ability is extremely limited because my phone may not even be with me. It may be *gasp* in another room of the house or in a drawer somewhere.

Rest is not something I can say I’ve had much of lately, physically or mentally or spiritually. As crazy as it sounds, it sometimes seems like the Lord calls me in the night. “Seek me. I am your rest.”

“I am the vine; you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing.”
John 15:5 ESV