‘I can’t do it’

I recently had a look at Franklin D Roosevelt’s 1st inaugural speech on becoming president of the USA. It’s the one where he said, ‘the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.’

This was in 1932, 3 years after the wall street crash sent the global economy into a recession that makes this one look like a tea party. In ‘the great depression’, millions lost everything; with no benefits system, when you lost your job, you lost your house and starved. In Germany, the crisis opened the way for Hitler and the Nazis. In the US, it gave us FDR – the only President to win 4 consecutive elections.

What’s remarkable about Roosevelt – and starkly contrasts with our political leadership today – is that he had a real vision for how to solve the problem. It wasn’t just ‘we’re going to cut back and it will probably all sort itself out.’ He had a plan to handle the complexities of the problem and propel a vast, hopeless nation into the greatest prosperity the world has ever known. And his plan worked.

Now when I look at the mess of our country today, nine gazillion pounds in debt or whatever it is, I don’t have a clue what to do about it. I’ve got a couple of nice ideas for little things that could help, but no solution to a global recession. The best I can come up with is, ‘well its all silly anyway as there’s only a recession on because someone decided there was and everybody believed them. Nothing real has actually changed.’ True, but that doesn’t alter the fact that people are losing their jobs, their businesses and their savings. We don’t need more insightful criticism. We need someone to do something. We need our own FDR.

But as I say that, this thought pops into my head that, you know, obviously that’s not possible. ‘Maybe back in history leaders could solve problems but not now. Now things are much too complex.’ I genuinely cannot imagine a person coming forward and leading us out of this mess. It doesn’t seem possible.

The thing is, I suspect that that’s exactly how everyone felt in 1932. ‘This is horrific, it’s ridiculous, and there’s nothing we can do about it.’ ‘This is far too complex for one man to make a difference. Maybe back in history...’ And yet one man did step forward and save the nation. It happened.

Maybe what’s keeping us in this mess is actually a crisis of belief. We don’t believe things can be any better. We don’t believe solutions can be found. And so we don’t go and find a way. It seems to me that we stick the label ‘impossible’ on far too many things; or at least, I do.

“I can’t cook.” “I can’t tell them no.” “I can’t get a job I actually want.” We’re like the child who huffingly fiddles with their shoelaces before throwing them down and declaring, “See – I can’t do it!” We can’t because we don’t really try, and we don’t really try because we don’t think we can. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I see it a lot among people my age, starting out in the working world. They don’t even bother trying to do the work they’d love to because they assume there are no jobs in it, or that they wouldn’t beat the competition. I often feel that myself (I certainly hear it said a lot).

Anything I’ve tried to do, from rehearsing a play to fixing my bike, has had all sorts of circumstances pop up against it. Nothing is easy, and nothing turns out perfectly like you dreamed it might. But you can make stuff happen if you believe and fight for it.

I heard someone say that most people are reactive, and only a few proactive. Now honestly it is harder work to proactively try to change the world for the better, than just take it as it comes. But because everyone else is reactive, if you are proactive, they will make room for you!

Speaking as a natural cynic, cynicism is easy. To believe is hard – not because it is unreasonable, but because it means you have to do something. Our world needs people who believe. Will you be one of them?

There is a man

There is a man who knows my mind
When I do not; and he designed
To taste my weakness, so that he
Could ever help and strengthen me.
With every choice he kept constrained
All his abilities and made
No moan for his afflicted time;
But crossed his life pursuing mine.

For I was sick and didn’t know;
Abused my neighbours, even though
I’d been so much abused myself -
‘Til I could think of nothing else.
And everything I stole from life
I locked away and called ‘my rights’
‘Til he who made this world living slipped
Into it poor to make us rich.

And I was still his enemy
When Jesus screamed in agony,
‘Forgive them’; and so it was done:
Exhausting death, he made us one.
His perfect life is mine; no power
Can ever take it from me now.
And I am longing to begin;
To take my cross and follow him.
To take my cross and follow him.

Better than you think

I had dinner at Chris and Lorna’s again. Something like this was bound to come up. We were chewing the fat, when suddenly Lorna starts singing this:

Love is like a magic penny
Hold it tight and you won’t have any
If you share it then you’ll have so many
They’ll roll all over the floor!

Love is something if you give it away
Give it away
Give it away
Love is something if you give it away
You’ll end up having more...

It’s an old kid’s song from school assemblies. That sort of thing doesn’t get blogged very often, which is enough reason alone to mention here. But here’s how I’m seeing it in my life – I’m going out with Emma.

Until now, I’ve never experienced romance as a positive thing. It’s always been a bottomless well to pour my energies in with no return. I got turned down last year by someone else, went away and spent 2 months trying to become superman so she’d change her mind. I took up jogging, and shouting ‘come on’ to people’s prayers. Thank God, these highly impressive achievements made no impact. But it’s a pretty classic example of my experience: love means working hard and getting nothing back.

I think I also projected this idea onto my relationship with God. Jesus said the most important thing in life is to ‘love God with all you heart, mind, soul and strength.’ Though I wouldn’t have said it, my expectation was that this would look like me working hard at being a good person, being good to others; and getting nothing back.

Now I could have told you then that that’s a load of misery-inducing nonsense, but that did not change the way I felt. Funnily enough, experience and expectation are closely linked – we tend to expect things will turn out the way they have before. So I’m hoping this upswing in my experience will encourage one in your expectation. Because my new experience is changing mine.

Instead of me working hard for Emma and getting nothing back, she not only way out-does me in acts of love, but I get as much joy out of doing things for her. I’m asking the universe, ‘how can this be allowed? Shouldn’t a certain amount of happiness cost an equivalent amount of pain? Isn’t the law of nature that energy only transfers from one state to another, but can never be created? Have I slipped through some kind of cosmic loophole which will be closed as soon as someone finds out?’

Which brings us back to the song. The magic of love is that it multiplies. It waves two fingers at ‘the laws of the universe’ (at least, to the wrong ideas I’ve got playing dictator to my head). This is what loving God is really like. It’s getting, getting, getting, far more and more quickly than I can ever give back.

I recently gave what I thought was a large amount of money to an international life-saving/community enrichment programme (which I saw as giving it to God). This weekend, two different groups of people offered to pay for me to go to two conferences- which together is worth at least £50 more than what I gave away! My generosity has already been outdone.

I could choose to believe my doubts – nothing is provable beyond the shading of a doubt – that all this is coincidence, and God either isn’t there or doesn’t care. It’s very easy to do, seeing as my experience of his love is so bound up with a picture of him I’ve built up through indirect means, like the story above and the stories in the Bible. I know lots of people who seem to experience his love more directly, through their feelings. Emotional literacy has never been my strong point. I could believe my doubts about God, like I could believe that Emma doesn’t really like me, she’s just being nice because she’s a nice person... but doesn’t that seem a bit crazy?

I do this with a lot of things in life. I put so much more energy into doubting good things are true/will come true, than doubting bad things, or into believing good things. It’s almost as if I didn’t want good things to be possible.

Take the issue of partnering with Jesus to heal sick people – all my thinking goes to why it probably won’t happen. I feel reluctant to even talk about it, let alone do it. But I love hearing stories of Jesus healing people, in the Bible and now, with people I know. So why am I so keen so expect so little? Isn’t the saddest cliché in the world, ‘it’s too good to be true?’

A recent psychological survey found that people in Denmark are the happiest in the world; where happiness was measured by satisfaction with one’s life... but this was because they had such low expectations, and were therefore never disappointed!

I don’t want to be a Dane anymore. I want to take the risk of believing too much, not too little. I’m sure I’m going to be disappointed at times, and that might statistically make me less happy; but I’m much more afraid of coming to the end of my mortal life and realising, ‘reality was so much better than I thought it was. And I missed it.’