2 Timothy 1:6-14; Psalm 40
Two weeks ago, Stefanie and I traveled seaside to Avalon to celebrate our first wedding anniversary. On one of the totally relaxing days we were there, we got to talking about the meaning of happiness. We anchored our conversation with something Stef had recently read in a magazine. It was an article that made reference to a Hungarian psychologist’s book called Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. I’ve since read that his ideas about happiness have influenced a good many people in business, government, education and the arts.[i] By the Holy Spirit, his theory flowed right on up to two vacationing pastors sitting beside the Atlantic Ocean!
This University of Chicago professor teaches that we most experience happiness when we find ourselves in the flow of being fully, creatively focused on a situation or task for its own sake. It happens, he writes, when “You know that what you need to do is possible to do, even though difficult, and sense of time disappears. You forget yourself. You feel part of something larger.”[ii] When we are in this flow, we experience a greater sense of inner clarity and serenity, and whatever is produced from the flow is its own reward. We come to enthusiastically trust that life is truly worth living.
Can you recall times when you’ve happily gotten “lost” in positive experiences of work and play? I sure hope so! One recent and wonderful flow experience for me was putting together and leading this year’s Pentecost and Confirmation worship service just before heading down the shore. There was much to incorporate into this special worship service, and I’m glad to witness that I felt the flow as I both prepared for and offered it all to the glory of God.
There’s one part of this theory that I find particularly interesting. It’s that this kind of genuinely happy flow happens between the times when we feel bored and the times when we feel anxious. This makes sense. Boredom comes about when we feel fatigued from tedious repetition and from an overwhelming sense of dullness about what you are either doing or supposed to be doing. And anxiety comes about when we are distressed and fearful about any number of things happening in our lives. Both are flow stoppers. How awesome, then, when we are able to focus on a situation or task with calm, clarity, and happiness instead of apathy and foreboding.
There’s one situation with all sorts of tasks that each one of us here has in common. It’s our life together as the Body of Christ in the world today, and, more specifically, as Fairmount Presbyterian Church. I’d like to be able to honestly say that each of us is constantly in the optimal flow of this. That you and I are always able to forget ourselves, have our sense of time disappear, and feel part of something larger as we glorify God in our daily walk and through participation in this church family. That we never experience any undercurrents of boredom and anxiety. That we are always genuinely happy, delighting to carry out the will of God in Jesus Christ. All of this is indeed optimal, our highest ideal, but when it comes to flow we know we can get to feeling more truly in a trickle.
During times when are too focused on ourselves, on tightly managing time, and being part of the Bible big picture fails to come into view … what can you and I do and pray for to be more fully, happily engaged in freely sharing the Good News of Jesus Christ in word and deed? Both of our Scripture readings this morning point to the same answer – maintain focus on trusting God.
Psalm 40 is boldly honest about life outside the optimal flow, life in the trickle. It speaks about times when we feel as though we are in a deep well of despair, times when it’s hard to be patient with God as we repeatedly cry out to be lifted up. In her interpretation of this Psalm, psychotherapist and poet Donna Hardy describes this as the times we feel “poor, needy, bogged down.”[iii]
Once this ancient song of faith helps us identify such low flow feelings, it then leads us to hear a full, free flowing and totally happy tune of salvation. The Psalmist clearly gets lost in love, wonder and praise and invites us to sing our own new songs of putting wholehearted trust in the Lord our God – the One who makes our steps secure, who has uncountable and incomparable good thoughts and deeds for us.
I particularly like the verse 6 reference to God opening our ears. Though our pew Bible translations don’t reference it, the original Hebrew accurately used here refers to God doing excavation work. This may sound a bit odd. But think … what is it God is always excavating in our lives? All the sinful sludge that blocks the happy flow! So I read this verse to be saying that God moves all this for us so we can receive divine revelation and further place our most fundamental trust where it truly belongs.
Our reading from 2 Timothy is also very honest about experiencing times of obstructing trickle instead of optimal flow. Specifically, these are the times when we feel our sufferings tempt us and do cause us to feel cowardly and ashamed before the Lord. Such terrible tunes are responded to with liberating melody about the grace given to us through our Savior Christ Jesus who, as it says so powerfully in verse 10, “abolished death and brought life and immortality to light through the gospel.” This is the central holy truth that gives our lives full and focused meaning! By doing, our well-being is opened up to receive and happily celebrate the standard of faith and love that we share in Christ Jesus. We enter into the flow of the “spirit of power and of love and of self-discipline” that has been entrusted to us with the help of the Holy Spirit living in us.
Trusting God in all circumstances is the pulse beat of our being the Body of Christ. It is what always increases our inner clarity and serenity. It is what always empowers us to help our Lord’s liberating Good News freely flow to every human heart. The greater our trust in what our Scripture readings this morning declare, the more we will find ourselves happily lost in wonder, love and praise wherever we are and whatever we are doing.
A really powerful witness to people optimally worshipping and trusting in the Lord comes out of the massive Kibera slum of Nairobi, Kenya. I haven’t yet had a chance to ask Pastor Chris Scrivens, my colleague in Chester, if this is where his very dramatic black and white photos were taken during one of his many trips there. But I believe so. The witness I know of comes out of book whose author, Steve Corbett, is part of global movement called “Helping Without Hurting.” He speaks of seeing simply inhumane conditions and thinking this place was “completely God-forsaken.”[iv]
But then the Gospel song reached him. He writes, “To my amazement, right there among the dung, I heard the sound of a familiar hymn.” Following this flow, he found that every Sunday about thirty slum dwellers cram into a ten-by-twenty foot sanctuary made of cardboard boxes stapled to some woods studs. Upon his visit, he listened as one prayer of trust in the mercy and sovereignty of our Lord was lifted up after another – prayers to fill hungry children, to protect wives being abused, to heal blindness. Awful flow stoppers.
This experience led him to deeply honest faithful self-reflection. “I thought about my ample salary, my life insurance policy, my health insurance policy, my two cars, my house, etc.,” he writes, and “I realized that I do not really trust in God's sovereignty on a daily basis. I realized that these slum dwellers were trusting in God's sovereignty just to get them through the day, and they had a far deeper intimacy with God than I probably will ever have in my entire life.”
Everywhere we have ever gone and will ever go, there are songs and sites and the flow of fully offered trust in the Lord. They are born of happiness. Not the sort of happiness that superficially ebbs and flows along with short-term pleasures. They are born of the happiness that flows out only from those who truly make the Lord alone their greatest trust, who know sin is always being divinely excavated from their lives, who gladly offer songs of salvation from their unrestrained hearts, who intimately know the ever-multiplying, incomparable and uncountable good deeds and thoughts of God towards us. It is the happiness of those who, though suffering, live the words of 1 Timothy 1:8 about “relying on the power of God, who saved us and called us with a holy calling, not according to our works but according to his own purpose and grace.” Amen.
[i] http://psychology.about.com/od/profilesal/p/mihaly-csikszentmihalyi-biography.htm
[ii] http://www.ted.com/speakers/mihaly_csikszentmihalyi.html
[iii] http://www.faithandleadership.com/blog/02-05-2009/nathan-kirkpatrick-psalm-40
[iv] Steve Corbett, When Helping Hurts (Moody Press, 2012), pp. 64-65
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