Excited to introduce the next guest post of 2010. This is I believe #6 out of the 10 in ’10 guest posts that I am hosting on this blog this year. Enjoy engaging Eunice’s thoughts on motivation!————–(Disclaimer: I don’t have it all figured out, but these are fragmented pieces of my thought process.)
Recently, I’ve wondered how I will interact with my own children that will be different from the way I was raised. I never seemed to understand my parent’s reasoning. My mom’s excuse (I mean, reason) for anything I don’t agree with is simply “When you’re a mom, you’ll understand.” Which makes me think that when I have my children, I’ll have a lot to apologize for. Regardless, I hope I’ll take a different approach to motivating my kids. I still remember how my parents motivated my sister and I into action: by comparing us. “Look, you’re falling behind!” they’d exclaim when one of us would falter. I still wonder if that’s why one of my strengthfinders is “competition.”I began to realize how clueless I was about how to be motivated when meeting with a friend in May. As we shared our stories and commiserated at how difficult adulthood could be, we happened onto a subject that I would struggle to answer for the rest of the summer:“What is supposed to motivate us?”We’re aware enough to recognize that being motivated by guilt or shame (such as the comparison method) wasn’t healthy. But, when guilt and shame is gone, what’s supposed to fill you with a desire to take action?Years ago, as a student leader in Epic, I would have told the questioner to submit their doubts to God because of Christ’s sacrifice. But my post-college dive into adulthood was more of a bellyflop in that it was painful and ill-prepared. When I left college, the lines went from black and white to a blurred ocean of gray areas, and with that, the purpose behind being motivated wasn’t simply to be faithful, but really, what does faithfulness mean?Recently, I felt a relief to hear that the answer to all my problems was“just give it to the Lord.” But I began wondering if all it took was daily submission, why I had been spending the last few years sorting out the junk of my emotions and trying to become more aware of myself. Yet, the last two years of having my emotions and experiences validated helped extract the motivation of shame that lay deep in my life. It was a wrestling match to decide which I should follow: blind obedience and submission or seeking to reconcile my emotions and experiences.The clouds of confusion parted, just a little, when I read this passage in My Utmost for His Highest:”The level of my growth in grace is revealed by the way I look at obedience…The Son was obedient as our Redeemer, because He was the Son, not in order to become God’s Son.” (My Utmost for His Highest, Oswald Chambers)I began to understand, that motivation is a marriage of obedience and emotional awareness. If we look at submission in the right way, we can see that we submit without the threat of losing who we are if we fail to do so. It’s a combination of recognizing sin by knowing our own hearts. Once we do that, we’re free to be motivated by joy and real true love and not guilt or shame.It’s not a fear of falling behind, but knowing that I am not unloved by God when I fail. To understand that we are free to be motivated by joy takes away the stigma of failure and the expectation of perfection.What do you think about motivation being a marriage between obedience and emotional awareness?What have you discovered on your journey to an authentic and free source of motivation for action in life?————-Eunice Lee is part-time staff with Campus Crusade’s Epic Movement and a graduate of George Mason University in 2008 with a degree in Psychology. She currently resides in Southern California. You can check out her blog at http://www.epicvision.wordpress.com or you can follow her on twitter @eunicejean.
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