Let\u2019s say that you want to be more generous during this Advent. So you walk outside your door, feeling all resolution-y and tinsel-trimmed, and somebody asks you for money and you say, \u201cOf course!\u201d and then\u2026 look in your wallet and all you have is your debit card.<\/p>\n
This is basically how I live, in more ways than dealing with beggars. It\u2019s obviously related to the overpromising thing I already talked about, but the problem here is a little different, and has two aspects. The first is that I want to say yes but I\u2019m genuinely unprepared. If you know that people will ask you for certain things and you want to give them what they need, you need to have those things with you at the time they are most likely to ask. There\u2019s no point in just vowing to say yes more often, or be more generous or some other abstraction, if you don\u2019t ask yourself what you\u2019ll actually need in order to do that.<\/p>\n
The other issue is wanting to say yes but being morally<\/em> unprepared. I\u2019m often unprepared to be as open and self-giving as I\u2019d like to be because I get really uptight about being in control of, especially, my time. If I\u2019m watching a DVD I don\u2019t want you to call. If I\u2019m trying to work I don\u2019t want you to have a crisis. On a practical level I have everything I would need to be present and loving toward you (viz., a telephone) but on a moral level I\u2019m unprepared.<\/p>\n It\u2019s possible to prepare for love and service by surrendering the need to be in control. I\u2019ve managed to do this when it comes to my pregnancy center work. If I get a call with a 202 or 240 area code I will pretty much always pick it up, even if I\u2019m asleep, working, having fun, whatever, because it\u2019s probably a client. I\u2019ve trained myself to accept that there is no such thing as \u201cme time\u201d here. I\u2019m actually much worse about taking the same attitude toward people I know well, even my friends. I\u2019m trying to remind myself that almost everyone in the world gets along without \u201cme time\u201d; almost everyone is on call for the people they love whenever they can<\/em> be on call, and in a certain sense, that\u2019s actually what active love is<\/em>. Surrendering control of my time, and not resenting that surrender<\/em>, is I think one of the big ongoing projects in my moral life.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Let\u2019s say that you want to be more generous during this Advent. So you walk outside your door, feeling all resolution-y and tinsel-trimmed, and somebody asks you for money and you say, \u201cOf course!\u201d and then\u2026 look in your wallet and all you have is your debit card. This is basically how I live, in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1071,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,10],"tags":[196,65,60],"class_list":["post-6563","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mackerel-snapping","category-self-obsessed","tag-advent","tag-love","tag-way-the-hell-off-duty"],"yoast_head":"\n