How to Love the Life You Already Have
A Guest Post from Luke Norsworthy.
Today’s guest post is from my friend, Luke Norsworthy. Luke, his wife Lindsay, and their three daughters live in Austin, TX where Luke is the senior minister of the Westover Hills Church. He is the author of God over Good, Befriending Your Monsters, and most recently How to Love the Life You Already Have. For a decade, he has hosted Norsworthy, a podcast that helps his listeners navigate faith in the modern world.
How to Love the Life You Already Have is now available and you should pick up a copy TODAY!
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In the beginning, man and woman existed in a perfect world. They were to be fruitful and multiply, filling the earth from the ideal garden that had been gifted to them. It was all theirs until they took the one thing they weren’t allowed to take, so they lost everything they did have.
They were kicked out of the garden as a guardian, a half man and half lion creature with wings, appeared with a flaming sword in hand at the east side of the garden.
The first man and woman, and then the second, and third, and so forth, began moving eastward as they were called to be scattered and fill the Earth. Humanity left their naked adolescence back west and began the eastward movement towards a mature and civilized humanity until humanity’s ego interrupted.
Humanity no longer wanted to be scattered. Instead, they wanted to make a name for themselves, so they decided to build a tower that reached such great heights that they could storm the gates of the Heavens.
Unsurprisingly, the story ends terribly.
Humanity lost the ability to communicate.
One language became many languages, because they didn’t want to grow up.
Just as many churches in one city, become many because they can’t grow up in the midst of conflict.
Just as many of us end up with many careers, or many families, because it seemed easier to move on from the life that we have than to grow up.
Ryan Holiday describes this part of us that doesn’t want to grow up as the ego, saying it’s the “petulant child inside every person, the one that must get their way.” Like humanity has done from the beginning we’d rather construct our own ego-driven towers in ill-fated attempts at procuring comfort and security even if that prevents us from gaining maturity.
At the East gate of the Garden, God placed a sphinx like creature called a cherubim.
But a flying half lion-half human creature wasn’t scary enough,
so God gave it a sword.
And a sphinx with a sword also wasn’t enough,
so God made the sword a flaming sword.
All because God knew humanity would always want to go back to the good old days they knew instead of facing their fear of the unknown to grow into who they need to become.
It’s easier for us to try to keep fighting the cherubim and refusing to hop on board the journey God calls us to move to maturity, than to go through the painful process of developing the character that our life demands for us to have. We will keep being driven by our petulant childish ego by asking for life to give us the circumstances that we demand despite the despair this posture forms within us.
Psychoanalyst Dr. James Hollis writes,
Even when we bring these pockets of depression to consciousness, so often the way forward is fraught with anxiety as it takes us into new territory, asks more of us than ever before, and causes us to grow up by demanding full responsibility for how our lives turn out. But, as we noted earlier, this anxiety must be chosen over depression, for it is developmental, and depression is regressive. Anxiety is the price of the ticket to life; intrapsychic depression is the byproduct of our refusal to climb aboard.
What to do with it?
Here’s the opening line from Sturgill Simpson’s song Just Let Go.
“Woke up today and decided to kill my ego.
It ain’t ever done me no good no how.”
I often feel that way,
because my ego ain’t ever done me no good.
It’s just keeps encouraging me to not climb aboard God’s call for me to be scattered and matured.
While our ego isn’t doing much good,
trying to killing it might not do much good either.
The ego is a petulant child,
but it’s your petulant inner child.
It’s part of you. It might even be the very part of you that got you (or one day will get you) through the first half of life. And no one who loves themselves tries to kill part of their self.
The way you fight against your ego isn’t killing it. It’s the way you solve the problem of any petulant child,
you love it into maturity.
As Psalm 131 states,
O Lord, my heart is not lifted up,
my eyes are not raised too high;
I do not occupy myself with things
too great and too marvelous for me.
But I have calmed and quieted my soul,
like a weaned child with its mother;
my soul is like the weaned child that is with me.
The ego, which always concerns itself with things too great and too wonderful, can be calmed and quieted. It can become content like a weaned child with its mother, not because the mother hated the child, but because she loved it into maturity. Your ego is part of your life, and you must love not just the good parts of your life,. The way to keep moving eastward into maturity, despite the voice that says to stop and build a name for yourself, is to love that part of you into maturity. The way to love the ego from first-half-of-life thinking into second-half-of-life thinking requires self-compassion.
We must love the part of ourselves that keeps wanting to go back to the garden of the good old days, because it’s the part of ourselves that’s afraid. And shame doesn’t drive out fear. Shame only makes fear worse. What drives out fear is perfect love.
While the ego will always try to interrupt where you are going and who you are becoming, it doesn’t have to have the final word. The last word is spoken not from the child’s fear, but from the Heavenly parent’s love.
Adapted from How To Love the Life You Already Have: a Guide to Becoming the Person Your Life is Demanding you be.