Guatemala Week 4 (and a Half)

Hola ,

Saturday has come again and our fourth week in Guatemala has passed us.  Life here continues to go well in terms of the programs we’re running, though some of the team has continued to get sick.  But that’s to be expected I suppose.

On Monday evenings we have our team meeting.  One of the neighbors of the Ark, Janice, a very sweet mom, had sent us a letter from Ontario and Kat read it to us last night.  I often wonder what people think about and how they think, and it was refreshing and intriguing for me to hear a heartfelt letter from a lady with whom I personally have only had a few conversations. She wrote with touching sincerity in a way that was endearing and often humorous.  For example, she told us of how she was visiting an elderly man named Harold who choked on his food often because he didn’t chew enough.  She said that she told him to put his hands up and praise the Lord when he started choking.  When he asked her why, she said, “You’ll stop choking.  If you don’t, you’ll die praising the Lord.”

I appreciated her perspective on life – a perspective which was so different (at least in expression) than mine.  Being a student in part means that I live to study, and so life is sometimes reduced to ideas and abstractions.  As a mom who’d been out of school for a long time, her perspective on life focused on the mundane, yet through the lens of eternity.

Her letter also gave me an appreciation for letters which I haven’t had before.  I may have to write one sometime in the not too distant future.

On Friday our team is going on a three day trip to Semuc Champey, a breath-taking national park here in Guatemala.  I’m really looking forward to that.

I’ve been thinking a lot about emotion and the role it should play in my life this summer- a line of thought sparked by some conversations and remarks. I’ve often heard the refrain that “God doesn’t just love you, he likes you too.” It’s become almost a motto to some.  But I got thinking about that and came to the conclusion that it’s false.  ”Does God love everyone the same?” I think most Christians would say “yes”.  I would too.  The reason we can say “yes” is because the agape love that I’m referring to is a choice.  It is dependent only on the lover and not on the beloved.  It depends only on the person and character of the lover. It cannot therefore be earned or merited or in other way obtained from the lover.  We are told in one of John’s letters that “We love because he first loved us.”  God loved us before we loved him and independent of anything we did or can do.

The matter is different when we speak of “like”.  By using the word “like” I refer to “warm affection”.  To “like” someone or something is to feel a positive emotion towards the liked person or object.  If a guy “likes”a girl, he feels warm affection for her. Emotion is evoked.  A person does not choose to feel.  People feel whether they wish to or not; and often despite wishing that they wouldn’t feel.  Biblically, we are told that it is possible to please and displease God.  A human can affect the emotional disposition of God. But if we are flippant in saying that “God doesn’t just love everyone, he likes everyone”, we are essentially saying that everything pleases God.  This undermines the Biblical claim that man is fallen and needs Christ.  I do not think that everyone pleases God.

I want to live my life in such a way that when I die and have stood before God and have given an account to God for my life, he will say to me, “Well done, good and faithful servant.”  In the security of knowing one is loved, there is freedom to seek to please the lover.  In a good marriage the husband seeks to please his wife within the security of their wedding vow.  Relationships that depend on pleasing the other inorder to secure love will never be secure in love.

And if we believe it’s impossible to please God, the result is apathy. “If I can’t succeed or already have, why try?”

Introspectively, I’ve realized that my emotions are instinctive responses to my environment and thoughts.  In my mind I hold a system of propositions at a conscious and subconscious level which I believe to be true.  I feel emotion relative to this system of beliefs.  I belief that it is wrong to rape and therefore when I hear of a rape I feel anger towards the raper and pity and compassion for the raped.

This realization that emotions occur in response to an internal system of propositional beliefs is exceptionally useful.  Now when I feel an emotion, I can work backwards to identify and then evaluate my beliefs at the conscious and subconscious level.  If I feel gladness at meeting a new person, I can think about what belief is behind the emotion. Let’s say I feel gladness to meet the person because that person is an honest person.  I can then evaluate whether it is good to delight in an honest person.  I think it is, so I would approve of my belief; but if I think my belief is wrong, then I would change my belief. I would also afterwards know that I had completely changed my belief if my accompanying emotions also changed.

Therefore, as a diagnostic tool to evaluate and perfect one’s beliefs emotion is immensely useful.

I thought a lot more about this but I need to go to bed.  I hope this discovery is as helpful to you as it has been to me and I’ll write more about this later.

cheers,

Steven