My First Semester: How do you feel?

As headed back to college on Monday, I was excited to go back yet unprepared in many aspects to restart my busy life after the lull of the holidays.  As I return to college, I do not feel completely ready to both learn more things and put in to practice the things that I learned last semester, especially the life lessons that I have outlined in my previous two blog posts.  I think it is important, especially in the life of a young person like me, to continuously look for life lessons.  This normally comes by good and bad experiences.  As R. G. LeTourneau once said when reciting a certain billboard: "I got my good judgment from my experience, and my experience from my bad judgment".   So as I look for lessons in my own life, especially those made fresh by the college experience, this is one principle that has really stuck out to me:

Feelings are not as important as we make out in today's society.

Now let me clarify myself, I am not throwing feelings out the window.  We should not attempt to make others feel bad or find feelings somehow undesirable.  Nevertheless, feelings play a much larger part in our lives than they should.

A few years ago, on the drive back from my weekly piano lessons as a student teacher, I would catch a certain podcast on the radio by Robert Jeffress.  This pastor presented a certain picture of persistence in a particular podcast.  One of his quotes was particularly eye opening for me: "It is much easier to act yourself into a feeling, than to feel yourself into an action."  Now that quote sounds like a mouthful at first, and it took my a while to truly understand it and take it to heart.

In my previous blog post, I talked about hard work and motivation.  When I look at these two concepts in today's world, their biggest enemy is one's feelings.  In a sense, our feelings rule our lives.  All around us, we are bombarded with advertisements and objects that offer us positive feelings.  We are offered positive and beneficial feelings through financial security: the latest electronics, sexual experiences, and the biggest and best possessions.  This attitude that our life should cater to our feelings is in many ways antithetical to hard work and motivation.  As a result of this attitude, when presented with a task of any size or shape, we often fail to go through with it because we do not feel like doing it.  We do not feel like doing our homework, we do not feel like being nice to that guy, we do not feel like spending our time and energy investing in others, we do not feel like working on our relationship with God.  However, if we look to our feelings to govern our actions, we usually end up accomplishing nothing.  And this is where I find the quote previously mentioned so applicable to today's society.  "It is much easier to act yourself into a feeling, than to feel yourself into an action."  The fact is, we often rely on our feelings to motivate us to action.  Yet when this becomes our mode of self-motivation, we seldom get anything accomplished.

Contrast the futility of being felt into action with the power of acting oneself into a feeling.  Start working, and motivation will soon come to work harder.  For those of you that have been on mission trips before, isn't it right after a mission trip when you are most fired up and ready to help people?  Assuredly, it is after the mission trip is done that you feel that you have been lacking in the actions department.  Many a time have I been fired up to help others after a fulfilling Church mission trip.  This illustrates my point perfectly.  Sometimes, when the feelings do not come, you just have to follow Nike's slogan: "just do it".

This whole idea of feelings being insufficient for action has a great correspondence to the greatest quality in our Christian faith: love.  Here is another quote by one of the greatest Christian minds, C. S. Lewis: “Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person's ultimate good as far as it can be obtained.”  As Christians, we are clearly called to love others.  However, our cultures view of feelings often gets in our way.  We often wait for some butterfly feeling in our stomachs before we do something.  However, as Lewis points out, this is not the Christian view of love. The Christian's idea of love is a constant desire for another person's good, something that can never be produced by feelings, thereby proving the futility of feelings as a motivating force.  And now an excursus into some theology, Christians, we understand the futility of feelings and realize that this power to be motivated to good deeds is ours through the power of the Holy Spirit.  Recently, I have been reading through Colossians, and this stuck out to me: "May you be strengthened with all power, according to his glorious might, for all endurance and patience with joy."  (Colossians 1:11 ESV)

So what does this have to do with school?  As I head back on Monday, I am challenged to put these ideas into actions.  They are ideas that I have learned, yet in many ways, they are still ideas.  Putting these things into practice is much more importance.  And now to quote another smart man, Mark Driscoll, "it is not just about information but transformation.". My feelings are always present, and seldom ignored.  I hope to come to a point where I will not be controlled by my feelings, but act myself into a healthy way of life.