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A Choice to Make
The Samaritan had to get off his donkey to help the victim. As opposed to others in the tale, he stopped what he was doing to become engaged with the plight of the robbed-and-beat-up person.
Jesus ended the episode with a clear instruction, “Go and do likewise.”
Here are a few lessons we can glean from the Good Samaritan story:
- Helping others is what aligns us with God’s primary mission on earth. Jesus made it plain that God’s primary mission has to do with building and extending his kingdom. The church is not his major agenda.
- God created the church to be a people partnering with him in his redemptive mission in the world. Church is a who—not a what. It is a relationship between God and a chosen people.
- The key to experiencing life, according to Jesus, is to love God and serve those who are needy. As we move out of self-centeredness, self-consciousness, and self-absorption, we actually discover what we are seeking—to be truly alive! And in the process, the self we discover will be one we were created by God to be.
Just Passing By
Why do we pass by on the other side of the road when confronted with such obvious need?
Religious Activity
The priest and the Levite in this story represented leaders in the Jewish religious system in the first century. They opted out of helping a dying man in order to preserve their ability to perform their religious duties!
Are we acting neighborly? Are we helping anybody live a better life—here and now? Are we doing what Jesus commanded, or are we just really good at recalling his commands? If you are so involved in church that you don’t have any margin of time or energy or money for people who need help, then it’s more about religion than following Jesus.
Judgmentalism
I’ve previously shared my own Diversity & Inclusion Incompetency journey, and I recently summarized Michael Eric Dyson’s Sermon to White America.
There is deep, systemic prejudice in our American society, with a long history that predates me. In Jesus’ parable, judgmentalism and prejudice wilted when hospitality opened the door for compassion to enter.
Busyness and Distraction
One of the really effective strategies of the enemy is to wear down God’s people through exhausting lifestyles. American culture is infested with epidemic levels of busyness. Some wise cultural observer said that Western civilization will not blow up; it will just give out in a whimper, lie down, and die from exhaustion!
If we want to be more available to our neighbors in need, we will have to figure out some ways to increase the margins in our time and energy to make room for other people. We are so distracted by all we’re up to, we miss the people around us. And their needs. We just don’t notice.
Being Overwhelmed
The big picture of need can overwhelm us to the point of paralysis. Hunger, poverty, illiteracy, unemployment—these problems are so huge that we feel hopeless to make any difference. Scale the problem to one! If you help one kid learn to read, you may break the chain of poverty for that kid. It matters to that one you help.
Fear
Let’s go ahead and call this one out. Fear keeps a bunch of us from crossing the road to make a difference. Every occurrence or flash of fear can be rescripted in your mind as a reminder that you are not alone, that God is with you.
Indifference and Apathy
The willingness of the church to tolerate poverty, hunger, and illiteracy has contributed to the persistence of these conditions. If enough people get off their donkeys, the number of kids growing hungry at school will go down and the number of kids with good reading grades will go up!
Help Yourself
Get off your donkey and help somebody. You won’t just be helping them; you will be giving yourself a big break. Because when you help others, you help yourself!
Gallup research scientists identified a “Community Wellbeing” continuum with the highest end being giving back to society. They concluded that this sense of having made a contribution “may be what differentiates an exceptional life from a good one.” Jesus would call this the abundant life (John 10:10).
Both loving our neighbors and loving ourselves can be mutually reinforcing. You become the person God wants you to be as you help others.
One of the key benefits of serving others will be your own increased self-awareness, avoiding self-centeredness and self-absorption.
In New Zealand a few years ago, McNeal came across the sign, “ONE: WE.” There is no we without me, and there is no me without we. We’re all in this together.
Loving our neighbors as ourselves is another way of saying that our job is to bless the people we come in contact with. People who are serving in their communities have a zest for life that spills into every area of their lives. If we do not exercise our serving muscles, our souls will be undernourished.
Worship, Bible study, prayer, fasting, giving—discipleship has come to be measured as faithful participation in these church activities. Good works done for others in arenas outside the church are not celebrated much as part of the path to discipleship.
As we serve people, we should not pull back from sharing our best with them. We should be able to identify the reason for the hope that we have in us.
People deserve to know how much Jesus cares for them and the full measure of life he wants for them. We are not availing ourselves of enough opportunities to connect our motives to Jesus.
Doing good deeds eventually leads to a discussion of motives and beliefs. We do not have to shy away at that point from sharing our own experience. Serving people in Jesus’ name will bring you renewed joy and energy.
The Meaning of Life
The nagging question of your life’s mission points you beyond yourself to your designer. To God. Since you are an intentional creation of God, this means you don’t create your life’s mission; you discover it! When you adopt this perspective, life becomes a journey of discovery, an adventure into meaning and personal mission.
Figuring out your life’s mission will help you better know how to serve others. At the same time, the work of serving others can help you figure out your life mission. What comes easy to you, what you learn to do quickly, what you do that earns you great feedback and gives you personal satisfaction—these are clues to your talents.
Your personality is your preferred way of engaging the world around you. It’s the way you are wired to deal with other people and situations. Learning to appreciate your own personality can actually help you appreciate others’ as well.
Your life experiences have equipped you to serve others. They all have contributed to what you have to offer people.
The Big Reveal
Values are beliefs in action. They shape our decisions, determine how we spend our time and money, and play into how we conduct our relationships with others. Our values are more than preferences. They are the things we hold most dear—so dear, in fact, that we live according to them, whether or not we realize it.
Your values shape your character. Your character shapes your choices. Your choices shape your life. How you are spending your time, money, and energy are clear tip-offs to the values that are driving your life ship.
Finding others who can participate with you and encourage you will raise not only your accountability but probably your chances of success in the values-change process. A lot of times we think of accountability in negative terms—like empowering someone to slap our hands when we misbehave. I prefer to think o£ accountability partners as cheerleaders who are pulling for you and coaches who celebrate your progress and victories.
Take Your Best Shot
Your best shot at making your best contribution to the world is for you to get better at what you are already good at.
Don Clifton, former CEO of The Gallup Organization, wrote Soar with Your Strengths and Now, Discover Your Strengths, which provide a philosophical framework along with practical suggestions. Don said, “God didn’t make people to get work done; he made work to get people done.”
For you to engage life fully, you need to know what you bring to the table and figure out how to get better at it. Part of developing a strengths approach to life is to come to grips with and be at peace with the talents you have been given, not to agitate and exhaust yourself trying to obtain gifts that are not marked out for you.
Some people spend their energies trying to plug all the gaps or deficiencies in their abilities rather than building on their strengths. Figure out a way to quit doing stuff that brings you no energy or that you’re not particularly good at so you have the time and energy to use your talents more.
You Have a Lot to (Un)Learn
The walking dead are the people who have quit learning. If you want to maintain a vibrant life, you are going to be engaged in lifelong, continuous learning, which requires lifelong unlearning. We don’t have the room or capacity for new attitudes, new behaviors, or new habits until we first lose the old ones.
Consider how Paul’s unlearning changed the world. He unlearned his view of God so he could accommodate his encounters and experiences with Jesus and the Holy Spirit.
Frame your learning agenda in four categories that are common to everyone: self-awareness, skill development, resource management, and personal growth. Loving our neighbors as ourselves demands greater self-awareness while simultaneously gifting us with even more of it!
An adviser once asked, “How would you like to spend a year?” McNeal recognized how the question threw him, and it revolutionized his approach to scheduling his life.
Sometimes we fail to get the most out of a day, because we either squander our time of overload our docket. Serving other people requires that we create some margin in our lives to accommodate the activity.
Managing money involves more than just paying attention to income and expenses. It actually begins with your attitudes about money. What does money mean to you—prestige, success, power, leverage, access? Do you hoard it? Do you love to give it away?
Ask yourself, “What do I need to learn in order to feel like I’m growing as a person?” Then, develop a strategy that allows you to proactively address this need.
NASA engineers and scientists debrief astronauts after each mission to determine how future space ventures can be improved. In each case, the debriefing creates new knowledge and builds learning by uncovering what each person knows. Learning to debrief your own life experiences can help you capture insights and understandings that are then available to you in other life situations.
Who is mentoring you? Why not get a coach? A whole new genre of helpers is emerging in the field of life coaching. We all need people who will tell us what we need to hear, not just what we want to hear.
We can all learn something from each other. The people we help can be great learning partners, especially if we listen! They can broaden our perspectives, challenge our assumptions, and help us in our own self-discovery.
Keep Score—Make It Count!
Everyone has some dreams and ambitions. What separates some people from the rest of the pack is their ability translate their aspirations into specific accomplishments and concrete results. Identifying your life mission, figuring out your core values, assessing your strengths, and developing a learning path—then applying these insights in helping others—are all keys to making a difference in the world and to enjoying an abundant life. (Check out my post on Strategic Planning for You for some practical tips on how to do this effectively.)
What is true for organizations is true for individuals as well: what gets rewarded (celebrated, counted) gets done. What we pay attention to—keep score on—focuses our efforts and motivates us to achieve epic wins in our lives. Make sure your scorecard reflects your mission and life values.
Play to win; don’t play not to lose. You don’t have time not to score. People living with no target are guaranteed to hit it. Days, weeks, even months and years can be frittered away with no clear direction. Lost time equals lost living.
Develop a scorecard for any area of life. For example, check out my article entitled “S.M.I.L.E. as You Shoot for the Stars!” for more.
Making the move from hoping some things happen in your life to practicing greater intentionality can reduce a lot of stress. Advancing through a set of achievable actions is liberating. Once you get in the habit of keeping score, you will enjoy the benefits of feeling that you are making progress.
So make life count. Keep score. You are worth it. And so are they!
Your becoming a better you is the key to success for yourself and everyone around you.
In helping your neighbor, the return gift is that you are helped in becoming the person you want to be. And as you become more of that person, your capacity to be a help to your neighbor increases. It’s a beautiful win-win. Wouldn’t it be just like God to design a world where the best thing you can do for yourself is to help someone else?
Don’t wait on someone else to take the lead. Whatever you want to see happen, start doing it!
So, Get Off Your Donkey, as you shoot for the stars!