Forest Trail: responsibility

I am responsible for myself, and not for anyone else. I have to make my own decisions and accept the consequences of those decisions, but I don't punish myself when I make mistakes.

I have free will. My authority over myself is not dependent on what anyone else says or does, or on any other aspect of my circumstances. Nobody else lives inside my body, experiencing what I experience. I have to live my life the best I can with my own limited understanding. I can't depend on someone else to know what my best interests are, and nobody else could make my decisions for me even if I wanted them to, so I am the final authority for myself.

The fact that my understanding of reality is inaccurate doesn't mean I can legitimately base my actions on something I believe to be false—even if everyone else says it's true. If I did that, I would be forfeiting my life—giving up my own thoughts in favor of someone else's and living as an extension of them rather than as myself. Some cultures value this kind of self-effacement, but I don't. It seems to me that doing so deprives the world of my unique contribution to its store of experience.

My responsibility extends only to the boundaries of what I can control, which is myself. I can try to affect my environment, and I often can exert considerable influence over it, but I usually can't control it as completely as I'd like.

In particular, I can't control other people, and if I tried to do so, I would be attempting to usurp their responsibility for themselves. I now consider respect to be a fundamental aspect of love. Jesus told people to treat others the way they would want to be treated, and I still think that's the best way to get along. I don't want other people to try to control my life, so I want to respectfully allow them the freedom to live as they want as well.

Since people and other aspects of my environment aren't under my control, I have to base my decisions on my predictions of the effects of possible actions. I'm now more careful about making major decisions because I can't expect God to rescue me from my failures. I take more initiative to do things I want done, rather than waiting for God to do them for me. I more carefully consider the long-term effects of my actions because I no longer expect Jesus to come back and make everything right.

I used to spend hours berating myself after making a particularly poor decision. I no longer regard myself as flawed for having made a mistake, so I see wallowing in guilt as a waste of time. I constantly re-evaluate my decisions based on their outcomes, and when I conclude that a decision was not a good one, I think about it enough to try to avoid making the same mistake again, but I don't dwell on it because I know I can't undo it. I see no benefit in punishing myself beyond accepting the consequences of my actions and doing what I can to ameliorate the situation.

The artist does not see life as a problem to be solved, but as a medium for creation. - Dorothy Sayers

In 2002 I gradually became aware of a longing for a greater sense of purpose for my life. For several months I was very depressed over strains in my relationship with Jeanne, disappointments in my professional career, and my lack of close friends. In counseling, I discovered that I had avoided facing the lack of meaning for my life, and I began to wrestle with how to deal with my frustration. I wrote a lot in my journal and did a lot of reading. One day I decided to research ways in which other people found meaning for their lives, and found a psychologist's web site that discussed the issue of finding meaning in life.

The Existentialists make several good points: (1) to have a deep investment in the meaning our own life we must have thought about it very seriously, it can't be actions merely directed by parents or friends or teachers or ministers or anyone else. We must decide what has meaning for us (although we don't have to be an entirely original thinker about what is meaningful). Until we settle on a purpose, our life is in danger of having little meaning except for self-gratification. (2) Unless we think of ourselves as self-directed—as making choices about our life rather being determined by the genes, the past, and our social environment—we can't take great pride in the good we do. (3) It is pretty obvious that, given our personal limitations, individuals aren't mystically assigned a clear mission that changes the universe 1000 years from now. So, in some sense, we have to decide on and "make" our own life's meaning.
(Clayton E. Tucker-Ladd, Psychological Self-Help, chapter 3, at MentalHelp.net)

These points resonated with me because they made sense with the idea that God gave us freedom because what he wants from us is not lives of slavish obedience, but lives that are works of art.

My feeling was that if God wanted us to be slaves, he would give us moment-by-moment (or at least day-by-day) commands and detailed instructions, and expect us to carry them out without having to do much thinking about them, and certainly without taking any initiative to do anything else. I had been seeking such instructions, and wasn't getting them, so he seemed indifferent to what I did. My reinterpretation of his silence was to begin thinking of myself as a capable, responsible servant, who could be trusted to notice what needed to be done, decide how to do it, and get it done with minimal supervision.

That was a new concept to me, and it felt good, but it also felt like a radical departure from conventional Christianity, because I had never heard much teaching along those lines. The vast majority of the sermons I had heard strongly emphasized obedience, and only a few had even mentioned creativity.

It suddenly dawned on me that God had given me the responsibility of choosing what to do in my life, and that he wanted me to live creatively rather than just doing what other people say I should do. It occurred to me that his seeming indifference to what we do is actually freedom to respond to him with our best creativity. I decided that, contrary to what I've been taught all my life, God has no specific plan for my life, but rather leaves it up to me to decide how to honor him.

As I considered this, I realized that I have the freedom to do whatever I choose, and that of course other people do, too. I recognized that what I had heard in counseling was true—I had indeed damaged my relationships with my wife and other people by trying (usually unconsciously) to manipulate them.

The more I thought about it, the more excited I became about the possibilities for improvement in my life and my relationships. I decided to take responsibility for my own life, and let other people do the same. I was immediately overcome with the joy of that freedom. After that day my depression disappeared, and my relationship with Jeanne improved remarkably.