So Danielle’s shift starts at 8:00 am, which means that I have the kids by myself from the moment I wake up. Wyatt is pretty good, but demons have possessed Josselyn and no matter how many times I scream, “The power of Christ compels you!” they will not be exorcised. So she throws fit after fit, but, alas, I think, Danielle just needs to go make some instant potatoes then she’ll be back to share in the bliss of parenthood with me any moment now. Nearly three hours later I get a call from Danielle, “Have you gotten the kids dressed yet? It’s time to go deliver the meals.” By that time I have a pounding headache, Wyatt is upstairs making a ton of noise, and Josselyn is running around without a thread of clothes on. “I thought you’d be coming back home,” I say in a defeated tone. “Oh…I didn’t tell you?” she responds. “That was never the plan.”
George Bernard Shaw was right when he said, “The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.”
So I send Wyatt over to the church building while Josselyn and I negotiate (i.e. she refuses to wear anything and ends up pounding her fists on the ground while I give up and tell her that I am going to watch TV until she’s done acting like a baby). Finally Josselyn and I make it over to the church—a journey of only forty yards or so which involves her not paying attention where she’s going and falling into mud and leaves after I finally got her dressed. We hang out in Persinger Hall for a little bit, get our food, and then the whole family piles into the car to deliver meals to six homes. As we pull out of the church parking lot, my head is about to explode and Wyatt asks, “Do I have to go? This is going to be boring.”
The first delivery is unsuccessful as the person isn’t even at home. “Ugh! Why ask for a meal if you aren’t even going to be home?” I grumble. The next house is across the street. As the couple opens the door a cloud of cigarette smoke engulfs my family. “Quit spending all your money on cancer sticks and maybe you’d be able to afford your own food!” I think to myself as I hurry the kids toward the car. “I’m hungry,” Josselyn yells from the backseat. “I want to go home,” Wyatt complains. Danielle is noticeably agitated by her beloved family. As we drive up the street, trying to figure out where the next house is, Wyatt asks me, “Dad, why are you so sad? Or mad? What’s wrong with you?” That delivery goes just fine—uneventful. When we get back in the car Danielle says, “Maybe you should just drop us off at the house. Or maybe we should drop you off at the house.” I refuse. No, we're doing the Lord's work here! Can't you tell!
The next two deliveries go well. We meet some nice, appreciative ladies who may not have seen another person that day had we not come by. At the last house, nobody is home. Once again I think, “Ugh! Waste of time!” At that house Josselyn announces to Danielle that she has to pee—not soon, but at this very moment. There’s nowhere to take her so she ends up peeing in the grass on the side of this person’s house. Wyatt and I are watching from the car, mortified. “I think we should just go home,” Wyatt announces, with wisdom beyond his years. After trying to call the two deliveries that weren’t home (to no avail) we did just that—we went home. “Boy, that was a real joy!” we said sarcastically as we got out of the car. Then we ate two of the meals that we’d brought home (they were extras) and realized how good the meals were that we’d delivered to the shut-ins. This was a top notch Thanksgiving meal. After we got some food in our bellies, peace was a lot easier to come by. Then a few hours later, when we were all in good moods, we shared a wonderful Thanksgiving meal with the Glasses and Prestons.
So what happened that morning? Should I have just not delivered meals since I was in such a crummy mood? After all, the Apostle Paul does write in 2 Corinthians 9:7, “Each of you should give what you have decided in your heart to give, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver.” While I didn’t deliver meals under compulsion, I certainly did it reluctantly (simply because of my bad mood) and it was most certainly not done in a cheerful manner. Does the fact that my family delivered the meals in a less than joyful way (we were nice and smiled to each delivery then stared daggers at each other in the car) mean we shouldn’t have done it at all? Maybe I should just speak for myself here. When I signed up to deliver meals I was looking forward to it, but I didn’t feel joyful about doing it when the time came. So should I have not done it because I couldn’t do it joyfully? And does the fact that I did it with a bad attitude negate the value of the act of delivering meals to shut-ins?
To answer these questions we turn to that wise old Oxford professor, C.S. Lewis. In Mere Christianity, perhaps the most influential book in my Christian walk besides the Good Book itself, Lewis writes, “Love, in the Christian sense, does not mean an emotion. It is a state not of the feelings but of the will.” I did not have the emotion of love for any of the people I delivered food to but I had made an agreement that I would deliver those meals. I needed to fulfill my commitment. The meals were hot. It was time sensitive. I couldn’t afford to wait until the feelings returned. The meals would have been cold (and maybe moldy) by the time those warm fuzzy feelings returned. I had to keep my commitment and keep it on time. I guess I could have been rude to the people I delivered the meals to, you know, take it out on them. While I did that a little bit in my head, it wasn't their fault so I was quite nice to each person.
I am convinced that a great problem in our culture is that we’ve made a grand idol out of emotions. Don’t get me wrong—emotions are extremely important, we should never manipulate or harm others’ emotions, and we should all have the opportunity to express our emotions in healthy way—but emotions are not the end-all-be-all when it comes to life. But our culture often acts as though they are. Here’s one example: a married couple falling “out of love” with one another. “I just don’t feel like I love her anymore. But I have such strong emotions for this new woman.” News flash! If your emotions ran dry for one person they’ll run dry for the next one too. As I heard a wise pastor say once to a couple on their wedding day, “Love will not always hold your marriage together. Quite often, the marriage will hold your love together.” He meant that their commitment would carry them through places where their emotions couldn’t. Love is a choice, an act of the will.
Do you think Danielle has strong feelings of longing for me every day? Ha! Fat chance! But, thank God, she chooses to love me every day, not just on the days when she feels the emotion of love toward me. So we do acts of love, like delivering a hot meal to a lonely person on Thanksgiving, even when we don’t want to at that particular moment. In fact, in another C.S. Lewis classic, The Screwtape Letters, the high ranking demon, Wormwood, says to the low ranking demon, Screwtape, that they know they have lost their “subject” (person) that they’ve been trying to lead to damnation when the subject gets to a point where he or she doesn’t want to do what God commands, but does it anyway. That's when they know God's won that person.
I’m not trying to hold myself up as an example of saintly behavior. “Never make yourself the hero of your own sermon,” my preaching professor warned us in seminary, and that probably applies to blog posts as well when they’re written as a pastoral act. I’m just trying to illustrate that all of us (even people who seem happy all the time) get in bad moods sometimes; we all have times when the emotions of love and joy are absent. This even happens with worship. “I just didn’t feel like worshiping today” is a poor excuse for not showing up at worship. I don’t even buy, “I just don’t feel like I believe anymore,” as a reason not to show up at worship. Sometimes I don’t feel like worshiping and sometimes I don’t feel like I believe anymore, and I’m the one leading worship! That happens to all of us, but the commitment to God in Jesus Christ carries us through those places where we don't have any emotions toward God. As one of my seminary professors told us that he said to a man who told him that he wasn’t coming to worship anymore because he just didn’t feel like he believed in the faith presented in the Apostles’ Creed anymore, “Keep coming to worship. Let the Church say the creed for you. We’ll profess our faith, the faith of the Church, for you… until you can do it again for yourself.”
“Not feeling it” neither excuses us nor excludes us from doing acts of worship toward God and acts of love and kindness toward others in Christ’s name. It is a problem, however, if we never feel joyful about it, if we always feel like we’re just doing our duty. Then there are deeper issues at play that may or may not include ingratitude and/or an unhealthy condemnation toward others (or in more extreme cases even clinical depression). But to put it bluntly, sometimes we just can’t muster the warm fuzzies. In those moments, we have to suck it up and serve anyway. Sometimes the warm fuzzies come during or after we serve instead of before. As our buddy C.S. Lewis writes, “Do not waste time bothering whether you “love” your neighbor; act as if you did. As soon as we do this we find one of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him.”
I’ll leave you with this extended quote, once again from C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity:
“On the whole, God’s love for us is a much safer subject to think about than our love for Him. Nobody can always have devout feelings: and even if we could, feelings are not what God principally cares about. Christian love, either towards God or towards man, is an affair of the will. If we are trying to do His will we are obeying the commandment, ‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God.’ He will give us feelings of love if He pleases. We cannot create them for ourselves, and we must not demand them as our right. But the great thing to remember is that though our feelings come and go, His love for us does not. It is not wearied by our sins, or our indifference; and, therefore, it is quite relentless in its determination that we shall be cured of those sins, at whatever cost to us, at whatever cost to Him.”Amen to that!
