What Motivates Me - Part 2

I wanted to talk more about why love motivates me when life gets difficult and hard. I don’t always communicate my heart clearly or in accurate words and terms, so with God’s grace and help I hope to turn my lemon into some delicious lemonade.

It is so easy to love when life is easy, pleasant, and fun just like a Walt Disney theme park or like a fairy tale when the “good” characters live happily ever after. The reality is that life is trouble from the day we are born till the day we die and not everyone gets to experience a golden life or have happiness in their life. Hence the founding fathers of America called it the “pursuit of happiness.”

My best friend, Kevin, used to tell me what his dad used to tell him and that is when life gives you a bunch of lemons then you make lemonade. I used to carry a bunch of lemons around in my life that I was unable to turn into lemonade because ultimately it was and is beyond my own power to make the lemonade. An example of this is losing someone you love either to death or by separation.

I can see lemons in my own kids’ lives, especially when they are little and have no concept of time yet like when I drop them off at daycare and have to go to work. In their little world they do not understand that when I leave them with the intention of only a temporary separation all they understand is that they do not know if they will ever see me again so they begin to cry and mourn for me. Just being separated from the ones they love and who bring them security is too much for them to bear.

The fact is that life’s lemons come in all shapes and sizes. Lemons can be just the same monotonous experience day after day such as going to work or living the same routine every day. Lemons can be a small as stubbing your toe or getting a paper cut or as large as experiencing a car wreck, enduring a hurricane, a job loss, or the loss of your home. Lemons can be experiencing a sickness or becoming poor. Lemons can come from the ones you love as well as from your enemies; they can be unintentional as well as intentional. Lemons can even come from yourself, such as your own weaknesses, limitations, and character flaws. Lemons can test your endurance, your patience, your very character. Lemons are trials and tribulations.

I believe that God allows lemons in our life so that we can learn to make lemonade. It is part of my faith that God has been trying to teach us to make lemonade from lemons from the very beginning of creation, and the ultimate example God has given to us is of Him becoming a man in order to show us the way to make lemonade out of all the lemons in life. In the end Jesus shows us that God is ultimately responsible for turning the ultimate lemons of evil, pain, suffering, and death into lemonade through the victory of Jesus’ righteous and pure life culminating ultimately in His resurrection into a new and glorious immortal life.

I’m not sure that I have clearly communicated such a difficult and painful subject on life’s lemons, but I have given it my best shot. In the end being able to endure lemons in life relies upon faith in God who has not just told us the way, but has lived through the lemons in life so that we could follow Him and one day taste the sweet lemonade of victory!

If you want to know why I am a Christian, then this is one of the main reasons why. No other religion, faith, or worldview that I know shows the way to make lemonade out of all life’s lemons and has such a guarantee of obtaining the sweet fruits of victory!

What Motivates Me

I had had visions of catching up on my blogging while I was on my Christmas vacation, but alas life does not always go as planned. It seems that when I was child and a young adult that I had plenty of time during the Christmas holidays to do whatever I wanted, but now that I have been blessed with a wife and a family my priorities about what is really important have changed, like blogging for example.

Blogging is fun and it is a means and medium for me to express myself to whomever cares, but blogging loses its fun, its appealing luster compared to serving my family and meeting their needs. Please do not misunderstand me though, serving my family and meeting their needs is not always fun, clean, restful, exciting, a highly praised, and a painless affair, in fact most of the time it is quite the opposite. Therefore, the question you are now asking is if serving and meeting my family’s needs is mostly unentertaining, dirty, sleepless, boring, a thankless, and a painful affair then why am I doing it…what is my motivation?

I can sum up in one word what motivates me to serve my family even when it is so unpleasant, and it is the word, “love.” Some people are primarily motivated by duty, by fear of loss, by selfishness or by some other motivation, but it is the call of sacrificial love that motivates me. It is not to say that I am always motivated purely by love, I do fall short of the glory of pure love, but my relationship with my wife and girls is based upon a calling to and a covenant made in the name of love. Daily I strive to remember my God who showed me the true meaning and depth of His love, who humbled Himself as less than God to become a man in order to serve me instead of demanding His rightful service, who came to create peace between God and man, who was willing to suffer greatly and ultimately die as the just for the unjust. It is when I remember the meaning and the depth of the love of my God that I gain the power, the strength, the pure motivation to serve and meet the needs of my family, even when my family occasionally treats me unjustly or with disrespect. For the love which God has given to me conquers all evil even when evil has tortured, raped, and taken my life for in the end God justly resurrected His son back to life again and has promised to resurrect those who are so willing to follow His son down the same path of God’s pure love.