Investment in our Yeses

Jesus presented a compelling connection:

“Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also” (Matthew 6:21)      

When I’ve heard this passage taught, preached, and commented on, usually—almost always—people declare, “Jesus is telling us that our internal world is the most important thing. When we have a heart for what matters, then we will give our money. Let’s be sure we change from the inside.”

      

This thought may be comforting, or even challenging, in many ways. But it’s not what Jesus said. Notice the order: It’s not “where your heart is, there will your treasure be also.” Instead: where our treasure is (first), there our heart will be also (second). Our heart follows our dollars. Not the other way around.

            

Our call in life is to say yes to what’s truly important. And what's one way to do that? The answer sounds slightly odd at first: By investing our money in it. (And I would be willing to add our time and our talents, but I’ll keep it focused for now.)

            

It’s actually commonsense. If I bought a sweet mountain bike (which I did), I’m going to take care of my Trek—I’ll make sure it’s clean, that the derailleur is adjusted precisely, the tires are pumped to the perfect psi, and that it’s appropriately locked at night and insured. That’s at least what I’m doing. Especially the latter… Because a bike of mine was stolen out of my garage a few years ago while I peacefully slept. And so again, I digress….

            

Whatever we invest our money in will be the place where our heart goes. Dollars lead the heart. And “heart” is the center of our lives—not just our emotions, but more so the will, the attitude, the way our lives are directed.

            

In order to deepen our yeses, we have to invest money in what’s important. As I’ve written before, we find our yeses where our passions meet God’s mission. That means that we put dollars into God’s mission, which Jesus defined as the poor, the marginal, the ones that society leaves aside because they are interesting and alluring. That requires giving to our local homeless mission, to overseas water projects, and to agencies that fight AIDS and waterborne diseases worldwide.

            

As we’ve learned to define our yeses, we know even more where that money should go. If we’ve completed and know the three words that define our personal branding—or at least that’s one way to do it—we learn to invest in these things. Want to be a great percussionist? Buy a good drum set. Invest in lessons. Download music that you’ll practice with. It’s not a guarantee that you’ll get better. But when you pay those bills, when you see that drum kit, you’ll be reminded. When you start playing that beautiful new Yamaha recording custom set, you’ll sound better. (And you’ll look cooler.) And that will make you want to play more.

            

And one hopes—at least I do for my life—that these yeses (even ones as innocuous as enjoying drums) may serve God’s mission (perhaps by leading worship, maybe by creating beautiful music or playing in the studio with a friend). Or because I enjoy it, these may simply make me more of who God calls me to be. As the great, ancient Christian writer, Irenaeus, phrased it so well, 

“The glory of God is a human being fully alive.” Irenaeus

 When we invest our treasure so that our hearts follow—if we’ve done this in the right way—we become fully alive. And in that yes, God is glorified.

The Know of Yes (Listening)

“Why do musicians compose symphonies and poets write poems? They do it because life wouldn’t have any meaning for them if they didn’t. That’s why I draw cartoons. It’s my life." Charles Schulz

Our calling engages our passions. When we come to the path that makes sense for us, there is an inner yes that resonates and energizes. Clearly this is not always easy—because often the path has difficulties—but, at the same time, it’s not toilsome because it’s the right path. And that rightness brings with it energy and creativity. There’s an inner drive that leads us to change the world for the better. 

      

The well-known author and pastor Frederick Buechner describes the right calling, hearing our yeses, as a beautiful duet of voices.

The kind of work God usually calls you to is the kind of work (a) that you need most to do and (b) that the world most needs to have done…. Neither the hair shirt nor the soft berth will do. The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet. Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking: A Seeker’s ABC

Buechner uses the term “work,” but I will replace this with “calling,” which arises at an amazing intersection of personal interest and external need.

      

With Buechner in mind, I’m going to change this slightly and phrase it more succinctly:

Our yes is where passion meets mission.

It’s where what we want most to do coincides with what God wants done in the world. It’s that itch we have to scratch. What we “need most to do” in Buechner’s definition reminds us that there is something (or perhaps a few things) that we “most need to do,” that has in it an inner “yes.”

      

But how do we know what we really care about? What does the experience of finding your passion feel like?

      

This brings me to a psychologist with a remarkable name, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. (For what it’s worth, I once heard someone comment that he prefers “Mike” and that his last name sounds something like “Chick-sent-me-high-ee.”) In his book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, Csikszentmihalyi presented a key idea for grasping how we find our passion. In the state of the mind he named “flow,” we experience deep enjoyment, challenge matched by our skills, creativity, and a sense that time is moving in a different, and fuller, way. How can “flow”—or “optimal experience”—be described?

“‘Flow’ is the way people describe their state of mind when consciousness is harmoniously ordered, and they want to pursue whatever they are doing for its own sake.” Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.

One key example for Csikszentmihalyi is the work of a surgeon, who operates within certain limits (defined by keeping the patient alive), for a specific goal (the improved health of the patient), with a task that's entirely demanding and rewarding. Although paradigmatic, surgeons don’t exhaust the experience of flow. In fact, flow is actually a reasonably universal experience.

      

But how did he find this out? He developed a new form of research, the Experience Sampling Method, in which hundreds of subjects wore pagers that beeped at odd intervals throughout their days. When paged, the participants had to quickly fill out a brief survey that noted what activity they were engaged in and a series of questions of whether they were more or less in the “flow.” Were they in “optimal experience”?

      

Csikszentmihalyi’s research indicates some surprising results: for example, human beings experience flow more often when they are working than when they are at leisure. In fact, 54% of the participants who were “in flow” were paged at work. And although television requires mental processing, very little else mentally, like memory, is engaged. “Not surprisingly, people report some of the lowest levels of concentration, use of skills, clarity of thought, and feelings of potency when watching television.”

      

Ultimately, he asserts, optimal experience makes life worth living. When we’re in the flow, we want to do nothing else. And we don’t really care about much else. 

“An activity that produces such experiences is so gratifying that people are willing to do it for its own sake, with little concern for what they will get out of it, even when it is difficult, or dangerous." Csikszentmihalyi.

So if your “pager” beeped right now, would you be “in flow”? Take some notes throughout this week at random intervals and see when you’re in optimal experience, whether you’d keep doing that activity and “are willing to do it for its own sake, with little concern for what they will get out of it.” As the fabulous book Designing Your Life reminds us, it may take some "trialing" or testing--which is the theme of the next section--to find your passions. Still, the key for this post is that your passions will lead you to yes.

Yes and No

We have seen and known some people who seem to have found this deep Center of living, where the fretful calls of life are integrated, where No as well as Yes can be said with confidence.

Thomas Kelly

Through the miracle of self-publishing, my newest book, The Time for No, has just appeared. I thought it might be a moment to reflect on this fact.

It--and by "it" I mean publishing this book and Say Yes to No--began with the aftermath of 9-11 in New York City and a sermon I preached, "A Time for Yes and a Time for No," which built off a slight reworking of Ecclesiastes 3, 

For everything there is a season,and a time for every matter under heaven:a time to be born, and a time to die;a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted…
a time to seek, and a time to lose;a time to keep, and a time to throw away;a time for no, and a time for yes.

I realized that, after the tragedy of that day, we as a country needed to return to key values, to key yeses. But in order to do that, we needed strategic, nurturing nos--the kind of no that surrounds, sustains, and protects our yeses.

So no is a critical word. But even with my first book, I knew it couldn't be the last word. I wrote something like this: Ultimately, our nos only create space for a deeper yes to be declared. Conversely the great yeses of life define our nos. Beyond the no, we are designed to listen to a still, small voice whispering Yes to what truly matters. Ultimately, it’s not even the yes that we pronounce. It’s the Yes of God we hear and follow fearlessly. 

In The Time for Yes, I continue. Yes is basic to faith. As the noted author Kathleen Norris has written in the introduction to Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith, human infants “build a vocabulary, making sense of the chaos of sound that bombards the senses.” She continues, “Eventually the rudiments of words come; often ‘Mama,’ ‘Dada,’ ‘Me,’ and the all-powerful ‘No!’ An unqualified ‘Yes’ is a harder sell, to both children and adults.” Actually I had always thought that nos were harder, that setting out boundaries in a world of seemingly infinite possibilities posed the greatest challenge, but Norris ties saying yes to realities of faith.

To say “yes” is to make a leap of faith, to risk oneself in a new and often scary relationship. Not being quite sure of what we are doing, or where it will lead us, we try on assent, we commit ourselves to affirmation. With luck, we find that our efforts are rewarded. The vocabulary of faith begins.^[i]

           Yes is also central to understanding Jesus Christ, at least according to the early Christian writer Paul who declared,

In him [that’s Christ] it is always “Yes.” For in him every one of God's promises is a “Yes.” (1 Corinthians 1:19-20)

By that, I believe Paul is leading us to see that God’s final word in Christ is an affirmation. Our nos, as it were, make make room for God's great Yes.

           One final note: The inverse is also true; faith is also basic to saying yes. Saying yes to our calling implies that Someone calls us. In my mind, this means God’s call, expressed definitively in Jesus.

           So I decided it was time to look at the time for yes.

---

[i] Norris, Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith (Riverhead, 1998), 1.

Investing in The Yes

Jesus presented a compelling connection: “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also” (Matthew 6:21). 

Hearts are shaped by the way we invest our dollars

            When I’ve heard that passage taught, preached, and commented on, usually—almost always—people declare, “Jesus is telling us that our internal world is the most important thing. When we care about things—when we have a heart for what matters—then we will give our money. Let’s be sure we change from the inside.”

            This thought may be comforting, or even challenging, in many ways. But it’s not what Jesus said. Notice the order: where our treasure is (first), their our heart will be also (second). It’s not “where your heart is, there will your treasure be also.” Our heart follows our dollars. Not the other way around.

            Our call in life is to say yes to what’s truly important. And what's one way to do that? The answer sounds slightly odd at first: By investing our money in it. (And I would be willing to add our time and our talents, but I’ll keep it focused for now.)

            It’s actually commonsense. If I buy a sweet bike (which I did), I’m going to take care of that bike—I’ll make sure it’s clean, that the derailleur is adjusted precisely, and that it’s appropriately locked at night and insured. That’s at least what I’m doing. Especially the latter… Because my bike was stolen out of my garage a year ago while I slept peacefully. But I digress….

            Whatever we invest our money in will be the place where our heart goes. Dollars lead the heart. And “heart” is the center of our lives—not just our emotions, but more so the will, the attitude, the way our lives are directed.

            In order to deepen our yeses, we have to invest money in what’s important. As I’ve written before, our yesese are where our passions meet God’s mission. That means that we put dollars into God’s mission, which Jesus defined as the poor, the marginal, the ones that society leaves aside because they are interesting and alluring. That requires giving to our local homeless mission, to overseas water projects, and to agencies that fight AIDS and waterborne diseases worldwide.

            As we’ve learned to define our yeses, we know even more where that money should go. If we’ve completed and know our Personal Branding Statement—or at least that’s one way to do it—we learn to invest in these things. Want to be a great percussionist? Buy a good drum set. Invest in lessons. Download music that you’ll practice with. It’s not a guarantee that you’ll get better. But when you pay those bills, when you see that drum kit, you’ll be reminded. When you start playing that beautiful new Yamaha recording custom set, you’ll sound better. And you’ll look cooler. And that will make you want to play more.

            And one hopes—at least I do for my life—that these yeses (even ones as innocuous as enjoying drums) may serve God’s mission (perhaps by leading worship, maybe by creating beautiful music). Or because I enjoy it, they may simply make me more of who God calls me to be. As the great Christian writer of old, Irenaeus, put it so well, “The glory of God is a human being fully alive.” When we invest our treasure so that our hearts follow—if we’ve done this in the right way—we become fully alive. And in that yes, God is glorified.

            There’s another component that lies close by—the “Yes friends” in our lives, those people who support our key yeses. I’ll get to that in the next post.