Motivation

Prayer has wrought a mess of good havoc in my life.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about how praying had boosted my self-confidence and given me a "holy spunk". One of the essential ingredients to that lesson was the taking away of both a fear of Man and a desire to please Man; they were invaders in place of holy desires to fear and please God.

An unexpected new issue has arisen in the wake:

Apathy. And a resulting lack of motivation.

I couldn't place where it came from at first, mostly because it neatly coincided with the end of Fall Quarter. But as the days passed, the apathy remained in atypical forms. I usually pack my schedule full of hangouts with different people, cramming in coffee with someone at every gap in my day. But for some reason now, even with multiple whole days free from work and school because of the break, I would feel no compulsion to schedule time with even a single person. It was such an uncharacteristic thing that I started asking questions about my motivation.

I then remembered the two taskmasters in my life that I had just demoted: fear of Man, and the desire to please Man. I had taken their whips away. And the immediate consequence was not having False Guilt barking in my ear to get off the couch, you lazy bum.

It wasn't that I no longer cared about people or stopped enjoying time with them. But the wrong motivation had been nipping at my heels so long I had forgotten why I was really running. The apathy frightened me at first; I wanted to crawl back in the shackles of fear and pleasing, just so I could get motivated again. But I knew better than that; I know that those two Man-centered poisons are not sustainable healthy motivation. So I went to the Bible asking -- what IS a healthy motivation?

It wasn't a scholastic scouring of the book, but I saw that our healthiest motivation is:

Love. Love for God and Man because God loved us.

That's it? Love?


I was irritated by such a simplistic answer.


What does that even look like, to be purely (or at least mostly) motivated by love? Sure, I know what it looks like in Christ's life, but what does it look in Average Joe's life? Different passages kept confirming that, at the heart of it and beneath the surface, love is the best motivator. By this point, I know that I'm in trouble. Because love does not speak as loudly or prick as sharply as fear and pleasing did. Not that I don't love the people I spent time with, but the fear and Man-pleasing sure helped spark the motivation when love hadn't been enough to get me moving before.


Honestly, part of what I hated is that I knew I don't have enough love. Half of the time, love doesn't even motivate the things I do for Dave - they're often things that I benefit from or will keep me out of trouble. And he's the person I love most, my own husband. I do not want my actions in our relationship to spring from fear and desire for compliments. I want to love him because I love him.


The apathy, as it turns out, was a good thing. When the false unhealthy motivations were stripped away, like weed vines tangled into a rug across the ground, apathy was what I found beneath it. Where I hoped to find fertile soil for and budding branches of loving motivation, I found bare gravelly dirt. It was discouraging, but at least it was no longer disguised by self-motivation.


I'm not even sure how to cultivate love as a motivation. Like I said, I don't really know what it would look like in everyday life. But unlike the weeds that keep sprouting up, I don't think it's something that will grow on its own. I don't even know how much I myself can cultivate it. After all, what love I have was first His, and that plant is not native to this soil. But I want it to grow here; I would like to be motivated by love, even though I know I'm not.