What's Your Motivation?

You may not believe it but I'm back.

You also may not believe what I'm about to write ... a serious post!

Dick Jaques likes to talk about how hearts are like cups of water. As we live our lives, we let things into our cups. Attitudes, actions, thoughts, speech, things we listen to, watch, submit ourselves to; the things we experience make their ways into our cups. When the cup is knocked, something is going to spill out. If your cup is full of clean, fresh water -- a pure heart -- clean, freah water come out. If your cup is full of luckwarm, cloudy water, or even smelly, muddy water, that is what will come out.

Last summer at Project Impact I saw the worst in a lot of people. It was a beautiful thing, though, because we experienced people spilling the dirty water from their cup and replacing it with clean, fresh, pure water. We were all surrounded by people who cared more for us than themselves, whose motivations for their actions were unselfish and pure -- not for their own gain but to serve others. Our groups and the groups around us genuinly wanted us to learn and grow. So, even though I saw the worst in people, I also saw the best. I know what those around me now are capable of. Many of them were even there.

Now, I see the opposite all around me. Many people are so selfishly motivated that they are tearing relationships apart. They are losing respect from those around them and creating malice. People who "care about" someone else fight over their relationship, both with the person they "care for" and with other people who also claim to. I see no selflessness in this, only selfishness. They don't care about the others involved or even the person they claim to "care about," evidenced by the fact that every person involved in these situations is always hurt. People are also defensive and aggresivley sarcastic and mean. People make fun of people. People make fun back even worse. And so on. People avoid people. People talk about people. It's sick.

I've had my fair share of these things, though luckily I have never been directly in the thick of it. I just want it all to stop. I want people to actually listen and act on what wiser people tell them. Every action has a motivation from the heart. If you strive to change the action, but not the motivation for the action, changing the action does no good. It will either come back or manifest itself in a much worse way. What we need is heart change. Ask yourself, "What's my motivation for saying/doing/thinking that?"