Determining the Strength of Desire

We are on day two of a series. Feel free to catch up.

When making decisions, we often try to weigh or compare our feelings about the potential outcomes against each other. The desires that seem strongest will dictate our path…right? Isn’t that how it works? You weigh the two outcomes and follow your heart. What could be wrong with that?

Well, there isn’t anything necessarily wrong with it. But let’s say you have a hard time determining what outcome you feel strongest about. The example I gave yesterday was like this: Say I have to choose between taking a job in California or staying in my current position at NSC. On the one hand, I value warm weather. On the other, I value being close to family. Whichever value I feel strongest about will guide me, yes? But let’s say I’m stuck in that process. What do I do?

Consider Jean-Paul Sartre. Sartre suggests that our desires and values have no pre-determined weight. Instead, we determine the strength of our desires and values with our actions.

This is a very different way of thinking. It suggests that we cannot simply put our feelings about one choice on one side of a scale and our feelings about the opposite choice on the opposite side of the scale to see which is heavier. Sartre believes that we invent or create our values through freely choosing a certain outcome.

Now, this makes sense to me now that I’ve had some time to digest it. It makes sense because I often don’t know what I feel strongly about in advance. According to Sartre’s way of seeing, I only know how I feel about something once I’ve decided how I’m going to act on it. This means we have great freedom and great responsibility when making decisions.

More tomorrow.

How do you know what you want the most?

We’re going to spend a few days talking about decision-making. Buckle up.

We had a healthy debate in a recent service about the phrase, “Follow your heart.” This is often the advice that we give in a situation where a person is confronted with a difficult decision where a person must choose between two incommensurate outcomes.

For example, say I have to choose between accepting a job in California or staying put. I cannot do both, I have to choose between them. I ask my mother for advice and she tells me, “Follow your heart.”

What would it mean to follow my heart?

Well, I think what people generally mean when they say this is either a. /do the thing you desire most/. In this case, it’s a matter of doing the thing you feel strongest about. It could also be implying b. /the thing you value the most will create the strongest desire/. In other words, let’s say I value warm weather the most, therefore I desire to move to California. That’s a values-based choice that is manifested in my feelings.

The question is, how do you know, in advance, which thing you want the most? How do you prove the strength of desire when making a choice?

Open My Eyes

When I stumbled across the Second Step and actually wrestled with it, my eyes opened to the possibility that maybe I was confused about what it means to believe in God. Maybe I had been sold a bill of goods or maybe I just wanted to find a club to be “in” and misunderstood what I was taught. Maybe all this joining and sorting and being in versus out of the “Jesus Club” was a man thing, not a God thing.

In recovery I read “We came to believe…” and that got me curious. Could it be that coming to believe is a process? Is it possible that I can “come to believe” in a way that does not require my certainty or my membership?

Is anyone crying for help? God is listening,ready to rescue you. If your heart is broken, you’ll find God right there; if you’re kicked in the gut, he’ll help you catch your breath. Disciples so often get into trouble; still, God is there every time. He’s your bodyguard, shielding every bone; not even a finger gets broken. The wicked commit slow suicide; they waste their lives hating the good. God pays for each slave’s freedom; no one who runs to him loses out.

~ Psalm 34:17-22 The Message

Congruent Character

For the past few days, we’ve been exploring a case-study about character assassinating, get caught up before reading today’s post.

When Tim reacts angrily towards James, and calls him a liar, Tim is drawing on his own past harm. This means he is not considering the history of his relationship with James, neither is he considering what he knows to be historically true about James. James has neither a history of breaking promises nor a history of lying (though, granted, we can assume that he has broken promises before and lied before, but they are by no means defining attributes).

What Tim has done makes perfect sense, and it does not need to be judged. We all react out of our past harms from time to time on instinct alone, without stopping to consider the relationship. But, it must still be said, this is a big problem, and it’s one many of us have. Let me be clear. The problem is this: Too often we will call a person a liar, or say they always do ___, or never do ____, or call them selfish, or uncaring, or aggressive, or passive, or whatever, because we’re feeling hurt as a result of our pasts, and not a result of our past history with that specific person. (This is not exclusively the case, but it is the case for many people in many relationships).

In fact, this is the source of a lot of ongoing, unresolved conflict for many of us. Circumstances often tempt us, or conspire against us, to consider other people’s actions in light of our pasts, rather than the other person’s past, or our past history with that person. If Tim were considering James’ past alone, he would never have called James a liar, because James has not demonstrated that is character is congruent with the label “liar.” Now, it’s obviously not possible to only treat people on their own terms. We’re always going to bring our pasts into things. But, how can we do so in a way that is a little more fair to those around us?

Stay tuned.

A prayer for Sunday

Before we enter our next series, a prayer.

24 God bless you and keep you,

25 God smile on you and gift you,

26 God look you full in the face
    and make you prosper.

~ Numbers 6:24-26, MSG