Have to vs Want to

Welcome back again everyone! My question for you today is: does your life feel like an obligation, or an opportunity? Does most of what you do each day feel like a have-to, or a want-to?

I’ve certainly been through periods of my life where I felt that all I ever got to do was fulfill obligations… or fail to do so. Few things are more disastrous to the sense of joy and excitement that ought, I believe, to be a near constant presence in our lives.

So what can we do in situations like this? I have several thoughts on this, but I’ll start with the most important. The biggest factor in how we perceive our lives is in whether or not we are believing the truth about them. Of course, you all know my theological beliefs, but that’s not necessarily what I mean. Modern research says that approximately 50 percent of our beliefs about ourselves contain errors. This is especially fascinating to me when considered in combination with something my good friend Dr. Caroline Leaf once wrote in her bestselling book, Who Switched Off My Brain? Namely, that our bodies contain no mechanisms for the negative, and therefore ANY time we experience a negative over a prolonged period of time, it is always a malfunction.

This is enormously encouraging, to think that the negative attitudes which sometimes take us over are not, in fact, rooted in truth. Keeping this in mind, if we are really honest with ourselves, I think we can always find good reasons to take joy in our lives. After all, if loving relationships are the most important things in our lives, then we always have an opportunity to express that love, and invest in others. All the more so when we encounter trouble.

I think losing sight of the meaning this lends our daily lives is another reason why daily tasks start to feel like impositions. It’s always easier to do something when you know why you’re doing it. A compelling reason clear in your head makes all the difference in the world. You can also see how once again, this circles back around to the necessity of truth. True though it may be that life is about the journey as much as the destination (if not more), it helps enormously to know where you’re going—not in terms of physical circumstances, but in terms of spiritual and relational issues.

I remember once when my youngest son George was little, he watched my wife vacuuming the carpet and tried to copy her. So he dragged the vacuum into another room she hadn’t done yet and ran it back and forth, and then got upset when his efforts didn’t get the carpet clean the way Hope’s had. Of course it would have helped, she showed him, to plug it in first. As human beings, our joy, and our power, comes from love and truth, and lately I’ve become increasingly aware of how they depend on each other.

Have a blessed, wonderful day!

Dr. Alex Loyd