Our very good friend, Dawn, posted something a few days ago that caught my attention. She has that ability because she’s very well grounded and thoughtful, at times singularly honest and transparent, and pretty wise for someone who didn’t break through 30 all that long ago. She also happens to be one of our ministers at church.

In the post, she laments a bit about how we often settle for existence, consumed with practicalities (she’s a mother of two young children, a wife, a friend, and a church leader) and miss out on real life. She says, “I want to stop settling and start living.” She says, “I want life that’s messy and good and hard and awesome.” Of course, being a Jesus follower and all, she says, “he wants us to know that he has life … real, raw, good, true, hard, and beautiful to offer us.”

Dawn is not your basic rule-follower although I have no reason to believe she’s adverse to rules. I can identify.

In my last post, I tried to whittle away at a lot of the noise about what’s really important and get to the crux of things. Rules should always point to something greater than themselves. As a big fan of freedom, rules should have a point for limiting my ability to choose whatever I want. Too few rules and we can explode with our human inadequacies and, poof, there goes civilization and its many benefits. Think Lord of the Flies.

Too many rules and, poof, there goes our ability to flourish, experience joy and beauty and all of the wonderful things that give life color. Think Stalinist Soviet Union.

Practical circumstances require boundaries that are all well and good. But, Dawn touches on something that fits right into the follow up to my last piece.

As I see it, Jesus said we need to focus on the main thing first. Not second, but first, because everything issues from that main thing. It supports all of the other things. It’s the compass point of True North, that always pulls us back to the central reason we are here and it informs us what we should do about the fact we are here. Or, we can look at it as the rock solid foundation upon which we build our homes that are metaphors for our lives: All of the principles, values, and behaviors that make a life a life. Of course really embracing this main thing to the point that it’s not just recognized in theory but followed in practice is not something simple.

Regardless, it’s the rest of the stuff that Dawn is bringing up and that actually occupies most of our attention. And, it’s to there I turn now.

Of course, Jesus gave us the Part B which is to “love our neighbors as ourselves.” Read “neighbors” as everyone else, including enemies. Which is a pretty preposterous statement, if we’re being honest. We have enough trouble loving our loved ones. That guy two doors down who is basically unlovable? That boss who learned her job from Attila the Hun? That creep who stole your identity? Thank you, Jesus. Great theory but let’s get real.

I imagine him sitting here and responding. I see him smiling knowingly and with understanding and then saying, “well, Brad, I have to tell you that it is real and I’m giving it to you straight. I know this is a lot to take in and it may appear impossible to you but I’m going to give you two clues to help you move forward. Are you ready?” I expect I’d say, “Sure, Lord, I’m ready.” To which I imagine he’d say, “The first thing to remember every day and all throughout your day is that I’m with you. I’m not somewhere else. My spirit is inside you and I’m right next to you. You are not alone and not without a whole pile of top notch resources. OK?” As I wrap my head around that, he’d go on: “And, the second thing is that it’s all about your heart. I’ll repeat that. It’s all about your heart.”

And, assuming the conversation continued (which, note to reader, it actually does on a constant basis), he would say that the key to all the next things lies in our hearts which the remarkable philosopher and theologian Dallas Willard said needs considerable renovation.

For the longest time, I just didn’t really get this. Well, actually, I did get good sized pieces of it but I really didn’t get it. I carried a bunch of baggage that included voices from my past that seemed to speak too frequently into my life regarding expectations and all of that. I carried a pretty strong intellect that would from time to time overwhelm heart things in the pursuit of reasonable objectives. I could go on and on and, actually, I did in those years of therapy.

I have learned so well that once we figure things out, the real battle is a heart battle.

It’s fair to ask what we mean by heart things as, literally, the heart is an organ that pumps life-giving blood while it’s in our brains we process thoughts and feelings and so forth. I’m not going to get into all of that but when we say heart, let us agree that that is how we identify our emotions and feelings that are so much of the substance of how we relate to the world around us and everything and everyone in it.

It is the place where we apprehend beauty, experience exquisite joy, grieve terribly, seethe with anger, swoon lovingly, and everything like this and so much more.

I read recently that nature is really about two things. Figure out what to eat and figure out how not to be eaten. I’d add a third. Figure out how and when to procreate so one’s progeny can figure out those other two things.

I think this is a little about what Dawn was trying to share. We can focus on all the “have to’s” and “should do’s” that fill up our minds and our days. But, we’d be missing the “get to’s” that really can burst forth all around us if we only open our hearts and let life in.

I think Jesus teaches the next things in many ways. He teaches that so many of our stresses and cares are ill-founded and they obscure our vision from taking in all that life has to offer. They set up barriers that diminish our relationships with others or even keep us from establishing relationships in the first place, no matter how brief.

As my friend, Ken, would say, the next things can make our hearts sing.

A next thing is embracing the concept of grace, both as a giver and receiver. Nothing liberates the heart from darkness like grace.

A next thing is learning to forgive and be forgiven. The failure to forgive is one of the most self-destructive behaviors we can imagine. It grabs ahold and fights for dear life not to let go. It spreads like a stain or cancer and can even be all consuming. It does very little to punish the offender and everything to punish us. And, the failure to forgive one’s self for past transgressions is to hold on to guilt and shame which similarly destroy life and do nothing to enhance it. This is why Jesus targeted so much of his ministry and teaching on forgiveness and why we say that the next things are of the heart.

A next thing is gazing upon others with kindness, compassion and empathy when circumstances, either of their own doing or of being thrust upon them, have bound or broken them. Such a gazing can then lead to action as we follow Jesus’ teaching to “set the captives free.” In this sense, others are held in bondage and we are called to know the nature of the binding and the means to loosen or discard them.

A next thing is being prepared all of the time to be lit up by all kinds of beauty that can seemingly burst out of nowhere, in nature or other people or in circumstance or any variety of things. Be ready to be Surprised by Joy as C.S. Lewis preached and entitled one of his books.

A next thing is recognizing our place in the scheme of things: A place that can only be described as realizing the world does not revolve around us or what we do or think (humility) while simultaneously realizing we are eternal beings who are eternally loved.

A next thing is the acceptance that we are always a work in progress, on a journey with a very specific destination … nothing really hazy about it. And, yes, that destination includes what happens to us after we die at the end of our lives but also what happens when we die to certain things in this life. Jesus says we have to give up our lives to have it. This is very true although I would have argued against the logic of that for decades.

A next thing is releasing the pride that says “don’t surrender” to the acceptance that in surrender is victory. The letting go of what the head screams out as the way things are in exchange for listening to the heart yearn for the way things could be.

A next thing is being slow to judge and quick to love. We need to have an ever present mirror through which we can gaze into our interior life to discover the places where we must admit things are pretty dark. And, as hard as that is, even modest attempts can result in pulling back from quick judgments of others that serve no ultimate purpose … other than to make us feel self-righteous and all puffed up. Self-righteousness is not a companion of love.

A next thing is to live with hope because there are not only a number of good reasons to justify it but it’s opposite, despair, is a pretty bad alternative. (This, in contradiction to prevailing post-modern and dystopian imagery flooding us from every corner.)

I could probably keep going for quite awhile but I’ll settle with these for now. Which brings us to the practical pieces.

For starters, Christianity gets a bad reputation (justifiably at times) for being a religion of don’ts. A long laundry list of the things we’re just not supposed to do and be. In defense of this perception are the widely cited Ten Commandments (Old Testament/Hebrew Bible) and Jesus’ teaching we know as his Sermon on the Mount. In the former, Moses reportedly hears from God that these are the basic rules that should guide his people’s beliefs and behaviors, thereby setting them apart form all other peoples who follow other gods and belief systems. They are, collectively, the way people can insulate themselves from evil while focusing on what is really important. These rules became a cornerstone for western civilization. In the latter, Jesus covers a lot of ground, including a lengthy teaching on who and why certain groups or classes of people are “blessed.” There are eight and they are often referred to as The Beatitudes. These are virtues that can bring tremendous rewards. Following that, in his Sermon, Jesus touches on a behaviors and beliefs that separate us from God’s love and from the life he wants for us. They seem harsh because of an almost revolutionary point he makes.

One’s interior life is as important as the outward expression. Unbridled anger becomes indistinguishable from murder. Feelings of retribution or attempts to enact an eye for an eye are replaced with love and forgiveness. While we read his words and can throw up our hands in desperation of the impossibility of following these commands, we need to pull back and realize a couple of things.

First, he wants us to awake to the realization that none of us can earn our way into heaven by following the letter of the law. No. God wants our hearts. It is only through a renovated heart can we really grasp the beauty and reality of what he is saying. No externally-mandated rule will succeed in accomplishing such a massive objective. Only a humble and contrite heart has that possibility.

And, secondly, he lets us know through everything that happens in this life that he is there to make up the difference between our lack of success in these areas and the high bar that is being set. In other words, we need him.

So, we realize that the key to all of the next things that make life so rewarding is a heart tuned to the features we’ve been discussing. But, we remain uniquely unqualified to live these things out to their fullest potential. I could go off on all sorts of theological paths to explain this but we don’t need to. All we have to do is search our hearts honestly to find that the abundant life that is being offered requires a level of surrender that seems downright impossible. A heart filled with anger is entirely synonymous with murder? When brutally wronged, we are called to forgive completely? When struck, we are required just to take it? And so on.

But the thing about casting a vision … and that’s what Jesus is doing … is that it compels us to move forward. Fortunately, we are offered both the description and the destination, with the map and vehicle, to boot.

No, we don’t have to settle for less. We don’t have to settle for dour or morose or being bound by daily stresses and anxieties, as challenging as that is for many of us. We don’t have to be captive to the material or the emptiness of a prideful life. The way out is before us.

In my last post, I talked about the main thing and in this one I’m talking about the next tier of things … the things that come before all the other things in our life that follow and make up the volume of stuff we think about and do regularly.

It begins with a vision and from that vision we can ground the most fundamental principles that give shape to our values that, in turn, govern who we are, what we do and where we’re going. I believe it’s that simple. To avoid such an approach is to be a ship at sea without a compass and rudder and with a sputtering engine in a never ending storm.

At the top of this, I mentioned Dawn and her challenge to herself and others. I took the liberty of capturing that challenge and placing it into the context of this discussion. We need not settle in her words and we CAN live a life of abundance and vibrancy, whatever our circumstance.

In closing, do you know people like this? People who do what they can to embrace the main thing and the next things? People whose life, perhaps, is not at all easy but who manifest joy while suffering in the sorrows and griefs that are expressive of a renovated heart? I do. And they are proof of the glorious possibilities that God offers. Thank you Jesus. Amen.