The wrong, the real and the right questions

The Wrong Questions

Because I honestly consider this to be a very wrong question. Just as wrong as the following questions:

• How Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook?
• How Bill Gates became the richest person in the world?
• How can Lionel Messi play that incredible soccer that he plays?
• How can rich people live such an incredible life?

Here’s the pattern for all these wrong questions: everything is happening outside. We’re identifying the people we’re focusing on with some sort of social models, then start to compare what we have with what those models have, in terms of self-esteem, money and lifestyle, and then we realize they have more than we do. So we start to ask these questions. Which, in fact, are just placeholders for the real ones.

The Real Questions

And the real ones are:

• Why can’t I create something as powerful as Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg can?
• Why can’t I be the richest person in the world and Bill Gates can?
• Why can’t I play soccer as good as Lionel Messi?
• Why can’t I live a beautiful life, like all the rich people are living?

You see? Every time they’re talking about somebody else, people are in fact talking about themselves. It’s always about some hidden desire that they cannot express or some difficult goal that they don’t even dream to set. In fact, they’re asking themselves why can’t they be somebody else.

The real questions, those that you’re avoiding, are always about how do you fit. What’s your place here and how do you make use of it. How much do you want to have, to do, to experience, to live.

At some point in your life, most likely when you were a child, you changed your genuine personality for a different one, one that you’ve been taught to be “the correct one”. So, instead of accepting yourself, your own intentions, instead of following your own plans, you changed things to fit in. And started to make detours, compromises and replaced your desires with others, much more acceptable, or fashionable, or socially compliant.

And that’s the source for the wrong questions. You forgot your real identity and now you try to find ways to get it back, by comparing yourself with others. And you keep asking these wrong questions, when instead you should focus on the real ones.

But even when you start asking the real questions, it doesn’t mean you’re there yet. After all, the title of this article says something about the wrong, the real AND the right questions. So, what’s the right question to ask, anyway?

The Right Questions

To make a long story short, here are the right questions:

• Do I really want to build Facebook?
• Do I really need all Bill Gates money?
• Do I really want to play soccer?
• Do I really want to be a rich person?

In 99.99% of the cases, the answers to the right questions are “No”. You don’t want to create Facebook, nor to play soccer like Lionel Messi, not even to be a rich person. (Believe me, deep down, each individual has a very different and personal representation of richness, very different form the “a shitload of money” approach). There is already a Facebook in place, you don’t need to build another one. It’s impossible anyway. You may build something better, but, as you already started to understand, that’s a completely different question.

You may think you want all of the above, because you kept your focus on the outside world for so much time, that you forgot what it’s like inside you. You forgot what you really want, and replaced your wishes with some ready made ones. Your goals are the goals of everybody. You try to fit your entire existence into some limited lifestyles patterns. Which is fundamentally wrong, since we’re all different. Beautifully different, I may add.

I think it’s ok to react to outside stimuli and have opinions. If something catches our attention somehow, we should take and sustain a certain position. Like when we talk about Facebook, for instance, to acknowledge that this is a very interesting trend. Or to acknowledge the fact that Lionel Messi plays very good soccer. These are our opinions, and it’s part of our personality to express them.

But what I think it’s not ok – and, subsequently, I try to change first in my own behavior – it’s the type of question that I’m asking about those stimuli.

So, the real question that I hear in fact from other people is:

“Why can’t I own a popular self-improvement blog, some apps in the AppStore and some ebooks published?”.

When you put it like this, it really makes you think, right? I’m sure you didn’t think about that… But wait, that’s only the real question you’re asking. So, you’d better move on and ask the right one:

“Do I really want to be someone else? Or just me?”.

Source: dragosroua.com

Love the one you’re with

After C. S. Lewis lost his wife, Helen, to cancer, he realized he didn’t have a single good picture of her. Maybe that’s hard to grasp in our culture of profile pics from every angle, but he wasn’t upset about it. In fact, he saw the distinct advantage of lacking a quality image of his wife. He wrote:

I want H., not something that is like her. A really good photograph might become in the end a snare, a horror, and an obstacle.

How could a photo of the woman he loved become a snare? Because in the absence of the real person, he saw his tendency to fill the image with his own fancy. In fact, this was one of the prominent themes for Lewis in A Grief Observed. He was terrified at the prospect of shaping Helen into a phantom of his own making. Particularly alarming was his inclination to long for certain aspects of Helen’s personality more than others. Of course he would never intentionally import something fictitious about her, but, he mused, “won’t the composition inevitably become more and more my own?” What worried Lewis most was that Helen would become to him merely an extension of himself, of his old bachelor pipe-dreams.

Spousal Resistance

Lewis illuminates an overlooked gift in marriage: spousal resistance. I am not talking about red-faced tension or caustic defiance. I mean the simple fact that your spouse is a real person whose very existence will not conform to the image you have of him or her. Spousal resistance anchors you to reality, a reality in which God calls you to love your actual spouse, not your preferred one. Lewis observed:

All reality is iconoclastic. The earthly beloved, even in this life, incessantly triumphs over your mere idea of her. And you want her to; you want her with all her resistances, all her faults, all her unexpectedness. That is, in her foursquare and independent reality. And this, not any image or memory, is what we are to love still, after she is dead.

And, I would argue, when she is alive, too. As odd as it sounds, we can be thankful for the thousands of little disagreements that season the marital relationship, the countless differences of perspective that make it alive. These indicate that you are interacting with an independent being, one you’ve been entrusted with to love sacrificially.

The Original and Best

The very essence of sacrificial love is accommodating another rather than expecting another to accommodate self. Taking Lewis’s insight, then, we should be suspicious of our tendency to admire only those characteristics we approve of in our spouse and to revise those we don’t. When remembering a deceased spouse, this is bad enough; you aren’t loving her, but an edited memory of her. When serving a living spouse, it is worse; you aren’t pursuing her, but what you hope she would be. Far better is to love the original, not your revised edition. After all, you’re an original, too.

Loving the original requires lifelong adjustment on your part, and this deference is a key proof of the marital love that Christians are called to (Eph. 5:21-33). Don’t be discouraged when you don’t see eye-to-eye with your spouse. Where there is no disagreement, no annoyance, no resistance, there is no opportunity for sacrifice. If we love only what is pleasing to us in our spouse, we are loving only our preferences. We don’t need the gospel to do that.

We do need it to free us from our tendency to adjust one another constantly to our liking. Jesus came to serve an impulsive Peter, a distracted Martha, a dubious Thomas. And he came to serve a silly person like each one of us. And yes, Christ’s redemptive love changes us by degree, but this change is about conformity to righteousness, not conformity to personal preference.

So if your wife laughs too easily for your taste, love her for it. If she’s more pessimistic than you prefer, minister to her fears. If your husband is quieter in social gatherings than you’d like, be grateful for it. If he has more difficulty making plans than you think reasonable, come alongside happily. In all the little spousal resistances, celebrate the privilege of loving a person, not an image.

As Lewis said, reality is iconoclastic. And thank God this is especially true in marriage.

Source: thegospelcoalition.org