Tag: purpose

Acceptance vs Approval

All of us have met people who rub us the wrong way.  And there are always things that people do that we disagree with, some of them very strongly.  Not everyone likes tattoos or piercings.  When I dyed my hair as a youth leader I got a great many negative comments from people who thought that it wasn’t the right behaviour.  Society has a great many different behaviours and attitudes that we disagree with.   As Christians this is more evident as we try to follow a standard for life that the world doesn’t believe in or in many cases agree with.

I have found that many people get rejected in life because we cannot agree with their choices.  We see the behaviour and stop and don’t go any further to the person underneath the behaviour.  Because we cannot approve of the decisions or behaviours we are critical of them and judge them harshly.  I have seen it so often and it is something I have wrestled with for many years.  I came to know the acceptance of Christ and found that it wasn’t conditional based on my behaviour.  And all through the gospels we see Jesus reaching into the lives of people who were in direct disobedience to what God wanted for them, and every person who met Jesus felt His acceptance of them.

If we see acceptance as approval we will never be able to build bridges to the people we come in contact with.  There will always be things we cannot approve of.  Approval means I am in agreement with.  So if you lifestyle is not something I can agree with then I must stand in disagreement and criticize and judge.  It seems to be the behaviour of many people in our world.

Acceptance however isn’t the same as approval.  People can be acceptable even when their choices go completely against what we hold as values and standards.  Acceptance looks at the person, not the behaviour.  Acceptance can be communicated even when approval cannot be given.  Acceptance says you are valuable and your value isn’t increased or decreased by your performance.   This is exactly what Jesus did.  Romans 5:8 “But think about this: while we were wasting our lives in sin, God revealed His powerful love to us in a tangible display—the Anointed One died for us.” (Voice)  Jesus didn’t wait for us to get everything right so He could die for us, He accepted us completely and paid our penalty, even though He couldn’t approve of our behavior. 

Acceptance seeks to listen, hear and understand a person simply because they are worth it.  Approval just looks for agreement with.  Our message can only properly go out as we work to separate these two.  Acceptance needs to be communicated and lived regardless of who people are and the choices they are making.  Acceptance is how love is communicated, and is one of the most vital needs in a persons life.  We don’t need to know people approve of us.  At times it is nice, but we can live without people’s agreement.  We cannot live without acceptance.  Something in our souls withers and dies when acceptance is withheld.

We need to receive and communicate acceptance in order for our lives to be healthy and whole.  It is up to us to decide whether we are going to learn to accept people for who they are and the intrinsic value they have, or if we will fight simply for approval and only spend time with people we can be in agreement with.

The Importance of Personal Values

A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both.”
Dwight D. Eisenhower
We are all faced with many questions and decisions each and every day.  We are called upon to determine the direction our life takes minute by minute from the time we awake to the time we return to sleep.  What is it that guides your decisions?
Many people determine their decisions based on the situation they are currently facing.  Others simply make the choice that best suits their current desires.  Still many others allow friend or family to make their decisions for them.  How do you make your decisions?  What do you fall back on when your world is in difficulty and the pressure is on?  How do you determine what you are willing to do and where you want to go when the stakes are high?
“It’s not hard to make decisions when you know what your values are.” ― Roy Disney
What you value is important because that will determine what you are willing to do and what you are willing to sacrifice in your life.  And once you know your values you can then decide easier what will best fit your values.  When you determine your values you decide for yourself what success looks like for you.  You can then be an immense success as a stay at home mom, even when the world wants you to be a leader of a fortune 500 company.  Success doesn’t mean that you are incredibly wealthy.  Success is determined by living life according to what you determined was important.  What do you value?  What are you building your life on?
You may determine that family is of great importance and wealth is very low.  This will allow you to decide what job you may be willing to take and how many hours of overtime you are willing to work.  You may determine that financial gain is most important and you will make decisions accordingly.  What you value arises from who you are and gives voice to the person you are becoming.  And if you don’t determine your values yourself, others will determine them for you.  Society, family, friends, employers are all clamoring to push their values on you.  And if you don’t have your own values to push back with you will become what they want you to become instead of who you are.
Determining what your personal values are isn’t as complicated as it sounds.  It will require you to sit quietly and do some thinking and writing, but it isn’t complicated.

First figure out what is important to you.  And make a list

  • There are many things we do that are important to others
  • What is important to you personally

Second think about why the things on your list are important to you

  • Some things are important to us simply because they are expected of us or we were told they were important
  • Some things we adopted from our parents, or mentors or other people we respected but we never took the time to figure out why
  • You need to decide if they are actually important to you, and if they are going to be something you build your life around you will need to know why they are important

Third work with your list and refine it.

  • Many of the things that are important which you wrote down will fit together.
  • Narrow you focus and shorten your list.  You want something you can use to guide your life, not a novel to carry around to read before every decision.  “For values or guiding principles to be truly effective they have to be verbs.” Simon Sinek
  • If your life isn’t spent living out your values they are not your values

If we will work with knowing what we value, and how we define success we can live lives full of purpose and discover and live our lives to our fullest potential.  With a little work and heart searching we can find out what is most important to us so that we are able to chart our course even when the storms are at their worst.

Values are extremely important.  Do you know what yours are?

Knowing Me as I Am

We are all the sum total of a number of various parts.  Our personalities are never made up of one thing.  We all have dominate personality traits and subordinate traits.  We have traits that function well under pressure and those that function well when things are calm.  Not one of us can say we are one thing and one thing only.  Even those most talkative extrovert needs and wants to be quiet and alone at times.  It is within everyone of us.

maninpiecesThe problem with our traits is we often categorize them and decide which ones we like and which ones we don’t like.  We try to set aside and forget about the traits we don’t like, and work to enhance the ones that we do.  We have parts of ourselves that we build our whole persona on and completely ignored and neglected others.

“If, for example, I only know my strong, competent self and am never able to embrace my weak or insecure self, I am forced to live a lie. I must pretend that I am strong and competent, not simply that I have strong and competent parts or that under certain circumstances I can be strong and competent. Similarly, if I refuse to face my deceitful self I live an illusion regarding my own integrity. Or if I am unwilling to acknowledge my prideful self, I live an illusion of false modesty.”

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When we separate and ignore parts of ourselves we think that we are helping ourselves and getting rid of what we feel is negative about us.  But we take away from ourselves when we do.  And the parts we ignore don’t ever actually go away.  They just simmer out of our sight, forgotten and ignored.  We think we have dealt with them and they are gone but they haven’t gone and they are not getting weaker.  In fact out of sight they have begun to build strength and will one day burst forth somewhere.  Just like a volcano erupts when it finds a weak spot, so the parts of ourselves we ignore will come out.  And they will usually come out in a destructive form.

Many addictions that people suffer from can sometimes be traced to parts of ourselves that we have shut down and ignored.  Parts of us that were important parts of ourselves.  David Benner wrote “There is enormous value in naming and coming to know these excluded parts of self. My playful self, my cautious self, my exhibitionistic self, my pleasing self, my competitive self and many other faces of my self all are parts of me, whether I acknowledge their presence or not.  Christian spirituality involves acknowledging all our part-selves, exposing them to God’s love and letting him weave them into the new person he is making. To do this, we must be willing to welcome these ignored parts as full members of the family of self, giving them space at the family table and slowly allowing them to be softened and healed by love and integrated into the whole person we are becoming.”

In order for us to be whole we need to discover the parts of ourselves that we have cut off and rejected, and begin to understand ourselves as a total picture, not just the design we were trying to become.  Our whole being was something that Jesus thought was worth dying for.  Everything we are including the parts we reject is part of who we were created to be.

“The self that God persistently loves is not my prettied-up pretend self but my actual self—the real me. But, master of delusion that I am, I have trouble penetrating my web of self-deceptions and knowing this real me. I continually confuse it with some ideal self that I wish I were.”

If we are to truly discover who we are we need to see all the parts of ourselves as important and valuable.  Only then can God show us how He designed us to be and only then can we actually become all we were meant to be.

“You can never be other than who you are until you are willing to embrace the reality of who you are. Only then can you truly become who you are most deeply called to be.”