THE ONLINE SEMINAR
How to Have the Living Water of Peace, Hope,
and Purpose that Jesus Promised Us
Session Five: Our Motivation
Part 1
Several years ago, Mickey Rooney, the American actor of film, television, Broadway, radio, and vaudeville fame, held a press conference to celebrate his 70th birthday. Reporters asked him some questions about his 300 films and his other Hollywood accomplishments – but they also asked him about his eight marriages, his addiction to gambling, his drug abuse, his wasting of millions of dollars in personal income, and his overall wild and turbulent life.
One reporter asked Rooney how he explained all these troubles. Rooney was surprisingly honest. He said that the reason for all his troubles was:
“I like to do what I want, when I want, and where I want,
without much thought for the needs of others. People
around me will fare best if they just don’t challenge me.”
Now let’s add a true personal story to Mickey Rooney’s statement to make our point complete.
Recently, my wife, Joanna, and I were having breakfast in a hotel, when our attention was drawn to a commotion nearby. Two women at another table were trying to eat their breakfast. One was the mother, and the other was the grandmother, of a baby girl about a year old in a high chair. The baby had a spoon and was pounding on her tray, throwing food, spilling water, and generally irritating the mother and grandmother.
They were trying to keep the child quiet, but the baby just grinned and continued her antics. Finally, the mother and grandmother stood up in disgust to leave. The mother lifted the child out of its high chair, intending to put her in her stroller. And that’s when the hand-to-hand combat broke out.
As soon as the baby saw the stroller, she gave a piercing shriek that rattled the dishes on the tables. Then she spread her arms and legs rigidly and braced them against the sides of stroller. The mother and grandmother pushed, pulled, threatened, and begged. But the child continued to scream and resist. Soon, their server and the dining room’s host arrived as reinforcements. But, like an outraged lion cub, the child held all four of the adults at bay. Finally, the battered adults staggered from the room in defeat. The mother exited carrying the grinning child. The grandmother followed pushing the empty stroller. The server and the host trailed at safe distances, carrying purses, diaper bags, and toys.
Now – because of our discussion of selfish human nature back in Session Four, you can guess the point of these two stories. These two stories (one about a seventy year-old actor and one about a baby girl in a high chair) are examples of natural, common, everyday human motivation. To understand what that means, let’s define the word “motivation.”
The word “motivation” comes from a Latin root that means to move. So, “motivation” refers to what moves us. “Motivation” refers to the inner source that produces our outer behavior. It refers to the internal reason that we do the things we do. “Motivation” is what powers our outer habits.
Now, the two true stories we just read were about an elderly man and a baby girl. So regardless of our gender and age, we should be able to think back over our own lives and ask ourselves why we did some of the things that we did. What internal motivations were powering our behavior in some of our best – and in some of our worst – behaviors over the years? (Assuming we’ve ever had “best” behaviors.)
Thus, to better understand motivation, let’s use all the principles we saw in previous sessions; and let’s also use The Three Circles diagram from previous sessions. Let’s return to the diagram now. But this time, let’s blacken Circle Three – the circle representing our self-centered human nature. We’ll let this black color represent the inner motivation of our human nature because, historically, the color black is a symbol of bad things in books and movies (things like death, villains, and evil). With that enhancement, the diagram now looks like this:
Selfish Motivation
As we can see on the diagram, Our Spirit and Our Selfish Nature (the bottom two circles) are both potential motivators of Our Mind (the top circle). We can think of the bottom two circles as “fountains” gushing powerful water upward into our mind in the top circle. Or we can think of the bottom two circles as “pistons” pushing explosive energy upward into our mind in the top circle. Or the bottom circles could be “batteries” sending stored electricity upward into our mind at the top. There are many images or analogies for the bottom circles.
But whatever image or analogy we choose for them, we need to remember a principle from Session Three: Our mind is morally and ethically neutral. It obediently operates on whatever “program” we “upload” to it. Thus, Our Spirit and Our Selfish Nature are potentially in competition to be the motivators of our outer behavior. So let’s take the next logical step: Now let’s see what The Three Circles diagram looks like when it shows the natural motivation of normal, everyday people.
That view of everyday motivation is in Part 2. Let’s turn there now.
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