Chapter 7: Clarifying Our Values, Passions, and Desires

If you’re not living your values, whose values are you living? (Michael Henderson)

Values

Susan, Mike and Dion are preparing a seminar for people in the hospitality industry. They have spent several hours working through the content of the seminar, and all feel pleased with the information they will be presenting. But Susan is uneasy about one point. She’s not comfortable with Mike’s suggestion that they produce a photocopied, stapled set of notes, in what she considers to be a very bland form. Furthermore, the intention to use no visual aids in the presentation is disturbing her.

So Susan voices her concerns. A discussion develops over what form the notes should take and whether a Powerpoint display is worth producing.

While some of this debate relates to what makes communication effective, a significant part of Susan’s concern comes from the high value she places on aesthetics. How something looks is very important to her. Visit her house and you quickly recognise that Susan has invested a lot of effort in decorating and shaping her home. It has a distinctive ambience that visitors pick up as soon they enter. Furthermore, when Susan serves up a meal to guests she takes great delight in making the dishes a work of art. They taste great, but part of her personal satisfaction is presenting them in a visually appealing way.

Mike, on the other hand, places a high value on simplicity. He is very utilitarian when it comes to things. As long as they do the job, it doesn’t matter too much what they look like. No surprise then that he drives an old car which needs some serious panel work, and wears clothes that lack fashion sense! Mike’s focus is putting his time and money into what he considers the more important aspects of life – relationships, hospitality, generosity, and people matters generally.

Is the high value Susan places on aesthetics right or wrong, good or bad? Neither.

Is this value God-inspired? Absolutely.

Does the fact that God values it mean that all of us should also value it? Yes – and No. We may not have an aesthetic bone in our body – in which case we need feel no compulsion to strive for Susan’s flair – but we can certainly learn to appreciate how things look and feel, and thereby begin to value beauty as part of God’s touch in his world.

What do we mean by “values”?

The struggle Susan and Mike are experiencing is essentially a tussle between each of their personal values. Both have developed preferences and priorities according to how they see the world around them. To them certain ideals and concepts are of greater importance or value than others. All of us have values. Some things will be given greater weight or importance by one person than by another.

Values:

• Feel important to you.

• Help define your fundamental character.

• Supply meaning to your work and life.

• Influence the decisions you make.

• Compel you to take a stand.

• Provide an atmosphere in which you are most productive.

(From Lifekeys – see Resources at the end.)

Where do we get our values?

This brings us to an important question – where do our values come from? Are they part of inherited nature (or “fingerprint”)? Or are they largely formed as a result of the environment we grow up in and the experiences we have?

As with our personality, the answer is both. Some of our values are inherited. They are part of our hard-wiring and relate intimately to our personality, talents and motivations. But the culture, family, and faith environments we are immersed in also play a significant role. In fact, some values are more dominant in particular families, faith communities or cultures.

For example, in Western European culture, being punctual is highly valued. If the bus is due to depart at seven o’clock, then arriving at five past seven means you are inconveniencing thirty other passengers. They have lost 5 minutes each = 150 minutes wasted. However, in many other cultures time is viewed much more flexibly. People are ruled less by the clock and more by doing whatever seems most important for sustaining relationships. We’ll hold the bus till half past seven if necessary so that Mereana doesn’t miss out on coming with us.

In the same way, many of our values are shaped by our belief system or worldview. How we see the world and ourselves dictates what we feel is important.

Like our worldview, our values are regularly adjusting and changing. New experiences and relationships challenge our beliefs and priorities. So do different stages of life – both physical stages and spiritual ones (see Chapter 10). For example, the high value many people place on financial success in their twenties can often, through a combination of all of the above, change to a much lower value in their forties. Others might discover the hollowness of “success” through a failed marriage, causing them to reconsider their worldview and values.

Why is it important to identify our values?

Values play a crucial role in our SoulPurpose and in the quest to discover where we can best serve. They provide us with a clearer sense of who we are, and are part of the grid we develop for evaluating and deciding what we should do and how we might go about it.

But the truth is that many of us are out of touch with our real values. We may think we attach significance to something but often the way we live demonstrates otherwise. For example, our family, peer group or faith may cause us to think that relationships are of enormous importance – but if our lifestyle, work and behaviour don’t bear that out, then it will produce discord and confusion in our lives. This will likely show itself in the form of stress, demotivation and frustration.

It’s therefore critical that we learn to be scrupulously honest with ourselves about what is truly important to us. We must own our value system.

Such honesty may also lead us to change our priorities. It’s okay to say, “I have to be honest and admit that the way I’m living now shows that health and fitness is not a high value for me. But I’d like to change that.” To make this meaningful you would need to re-shape your lifestyle – something that you might need help to accomplish.

Ultimately, our values focus our attention and give shape to where we direct our energy, helping to steer the course of our lives. Deciding what really counts enables us to make an evaluation: Where am I putting my energy? How does that equate to my real priorities?

Identifying our values is also a key to finding energy and strength in our lives. Michael Henderson puts it this way: “The Latin root word for values is valor, meaning strength. It is our values that give meaning in life, and meaning in turn provides us with strength, motivation and willpower. In understanding our values, we equip ourselves with a perennial source of motivation, focus and strength to achieve those things that matter most to us.”[1]

Moral values or personal preferences?

It can be easy to become confused by the way we have written about values here. Are we talking about absolute moral values or just personal preferences? The answer is both, although the exercises we use in this chapter are geared more to exploring our personal preferences.

When it comes to clarifying what you consider very important, you need to recognise the interplay between your moral concerns and your personal preferences. We encourage you to consider both as you decide what really matters to you. And if at times you feel each pulls you in a different direction, then analysing the source of that internal conflict can give rise to some very important insights.

When you feel pressured to become someone different from the way you naturally are, it may be God trying to remind you of some important values you have neglected. But it can also be something else – often just the result of pressures to conform to others’ expectations and values, perhaps ones that God does not want you to embrace.

Working out our values

The process of clarifying what we value is not easy. There are many ideals that each of us believes are important. The first exercise in this chapter begins the process of clarifying what you really do value most. As you read the limited list of values we have identified, you will most likely warm to as many as twenty or thirty.

However, working out which are your primary values requires you to rank them in order of priority. The critical question is not “Do I value this?” but rather “How much do I value this – relative to other values of mine?”

So the process of clarifying our values is really one of establishing those values that are most important to us – the ones we would fight tooth and nail to live by if they were challenged. For it’s not until one value is put at risk by another that we discover which is more vital to us.

For example, Ian is experiencing a few difficulties in his relationship with his work colleague John. They mainly revolve around John’s loose patterns of company money and materials. To put it bluntly, Ian feels that John is wasting valuable resources unnecessarily. He seems to photocopy vast sheets of paper for little discernable purpose. This goes right against Ian’s own values of frugality and environmental concern.

Ian, who is so careful to minimise wastage, is frustrated and annoyed. However, he also values smooth, interpersonal relationships with his workmates. He and John work well together – there’s synergy, along with a good measure of humour and trust. In deciding what to do about his growing feelings of annoyance towards John, Ian must weigh up which he values more. Is it “standing against wastage” or is it “warm and trusting work relationships”. Both, after all, are important to him. But deciding which is the more valuable will determine whether he learns to suffer his colleague’s wastage, or puts at risk his good working relationship.

The pressure of having to choose which conflicting values to value highest can be a painful experience, but we are confronted with these situations all the time. Dealing with them is what causes us to develop a hierarchy of values.

Organisational fit

Not only do individuals have values, but so do groups, organisations, and indeed whole cultures. So it is clearly to our advantage (though not essential) if we can find places to serve where our own values are complementary to those of the group we’re part of. At the very least, we should seek to make ourselves familiar with the values of the organisation. This may not be as easy as it sounds. We should beware of the possible gap between what an organisation says it values and what it really does value. For example, a business might confidently announce that it is “family friendly”, but you might need to talk with staff to discover if this is a reality or just a nicely voiced sentiment. (In this sense, organisations are no different from the individuals who make up them. For all of us there is generally a gap between what we say and how we act!)

The idea of “organisational fit” is becoming increasingly more relevant in the world of business. Many organisations now evaluate people not only in terms of their fit to a task or role, but also on their fit to the organisational culture and values.

A warning. When you examine your work or career, you could well reach the point of wondering whether you are in the wrong job. Sometimes, of course, you may be. However, often you could be in the right type of work but in the wrong workplace or organisation. The disquiet and unease you are experiencing may largely be a result of a clash of values.

If you suspect that you are in the wrong place rather than in the wrong job (i.e. your values are out of alignment with those encouraged by the culture of the organisation), there are a number of options open to you, which we explore briefly in the Appendix to this chapter.

Passion

Closely linked to our values are our passions. Like all words, passion has its limitations – mainly because it is generally applied to the deep emotions of romance. Passionate lovers are supposed to show high levels of physical affection. However, the word has a much wider meaning. We use it here in its full sense, referring to the intense enthusiasm (enthusiasm = “with-God-ness”) that we may have for an activity or cause. It’s the great joy we experience when we are involved in something we feel we were made for.

Passion is what “gets me going”; what “turns me on”. It’s likely to produce the kind of response Eric Liddell had, in the movie Chariots of Fire, when he explained to his sister, “When I run I sense God’s pleasure in my running.” A kind of “I was born for this” feeling.

A good test as to whether some activity is a passion for us is whether or not we become so caught up in it that we lose a sense of time and self while doing it. It both extends and absorbs us. Pyschologist Mike Csikszentmilhalyi refers to this as the “state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience itself is so enjoyable that people will do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it.”[2] We’ve all felt that way at some time in our lives.

When our passion is one with our sense of who we are and what we are here for (our SoulPurpose), it becomes a powerful force for good. This is where passion runs deeper than just the immense pleasure of doing something we love – such as playing football. What we’re talking about is the deep joy that results from engaging in a course of action much greater than ourselves. This is essentially what Frederick Buechner, the novelist, means when he writes about our “deep gladness”.

There are all different kinds of voices calling you to all different kinds of work, and the problem is to find out which is the voice of God rather than of Society, say, or the Superego, or Self-Interest … The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.[3]

Rosa Parks exemplifies this type of passion. She is the black American who refused to give up her seat to a white bus passenger and went to jail for her stand, thus becoming a catalyst for the burgeoning civil rights movement. Her early experiences of injustice, along with her conviction that all were equal in the sight of God, grew a passion that even the hardship of prison could not extinguish. Her life demonstrates how often our personal struggles and sufferings can launch us into a wider sphere. Having been brought face to face with an issue in our own lives, we end up acting on behalf of others.

Perhaps it was Rosa that Robert Kennedy had in mind, when he said:

Each time a man (or woman) stands up for an idea, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, s/he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centres of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.[4]

Few are willing to brave the disapproval of their fellows, the censure of their colleagues, the wrath of their society. Moral courage is a rarer commodity than bravery in battle or greater intelligence. Yet it is the one essential, vital quality for those who seek to change a world that yields most painfully to change.

The courage Kennedy is referring to is generally only possible because of passion. It’s the driving force, the fuel that propels people to work for change.

Desires

Our values and passions are closely entwined with our desires.

According to the dictionary “desires” are strong feelings of wishing or wanting something. They are the emotion of yearning for – even craving for – things or goals.

This book is about life planning. But can we possibly choose directions on the basis of our desires? Wouldn’t that be a selfish way to look for God’s guidance? In fact, can our desires be trusted at all?

Where do desires come from?

The Bible has both positive and negative comment on this topic. Clearly there are good desires and bad desires. For example:

Positively:

“Delight in the Lord and he will give you the desires of your heart.” Psalm 37:4 (NIV)

“Whoever desires to be an overseer, desires a noble task.” 1 Timothy 3:1 (NIV)

Negatively:

“Do not grant the wicked their desires, O Lord.” Psalm 140:8 (NIV)

“All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our sinful nature and following its desires and thoughts.” Ephesians 2:3 (NIV)

These verses indicate that our desires are a mixed bag. Some good, some bad, probably most a mixture of both – depending on their origin and how they are pursued.

Creation and the Fall

We are made in God’s image. God has desires and has created us with desires too. So desires are not bad in themselves.

Many desires are common to all people. For example, the desires for significance and meaning, for security, for service, for love (both received and given) … are all part of the very fabric of our humanity.

But how these desires are worked out in our lives is as different as we are unique. God has placed longings in us to help motivate us to find fulfilment and our SoulPurpose.

Like everything else in life, sin has impacted on our desires. Now it is a deeply flawed image of God’s character that shapes us. Our desires have been tainted and twisted.

This does not mean they are now all bad or wrong or evil. There is much that still reflects (even if sometimes opaquely) God’s crafting of who we are.

Distinguishing the good and the bad

We all easily understand the danger to our faith of pursuing every desire that crosses our minds. But the other extreme is an excessively self-conscious faith that robs us of enjoying the fulfilment of our heart’s desires. How do we find a way between these two errors?

Distinguishing between the helpful and unhelpful forces that tug on our lives is never easy. It requires wisdom to discern which desires really have been planted in us by God … and how much those longings are being subverted by our sinfulness. We need more wisdom to determine the right timing for pursuing our healthy desires. For example, God has given us sexual longings that look for fulfilment in a satisfying relationship. But this doesn’t mean that God is encouraging us to look for sexual satisfaction in every relationship as soon as possible. We are encouraged to exercise discernment and patience.

We may have an ambition to be a public speaker. In itself, this is a healthy desire that God has planted in us so that we can communicate effectively. However, it is also the kind of desire that, distorted by selfish ambition and indulged without restraint, can become excessively dependent on the buzz of the crowd and the thrill of gaining recognition. It can even lead to manipulating people. What started as a God-given desire can become corrupted.

The faith community we grow up in can also influence how we view some desires. For example, entrepreneurial business skills seem to be admired and prized by some parts of the Christian church – and viewed with suspicion by others. This usually depends on how business and capitalism are understood, rather than the skills themselves. So it is easy to elevate or despise certain desires according to other assumptions. Hence our need of discernment.

So where does this leave us?

Let’s put it all together:

• There are desires placed in us by God that point to the work he has prepared us to do.

• There are desires that are stimulated within us because of the things our culture promotes as important and makes us ambitious for.

• There are desires that are aroused by the particular group we identify with.

• There are desires that drive us and may become compulsions, even sometimes addictions, arising from hurt and unhealed parts of our being.

There is a difference between living as driven people and living as led people. Drivenness stems from unhealthy compulsions, and means that someone other than God is in control. But the deepest desires of our hearts have been placed there by God to motivate and guide us further into his purposes. Recognizing these desires is one way God leads us.

We need to discern our own motivation. Some of us need to guard against too negative a view of our desires. Others need to guard against too positive a view. The way we look on our desires tends to depend on which Christian tradition or community we have been raised in and shaped by.

Some of us have been taught to be deeply suspicious – even antagonistic toward our desires. We may have grown up with the belief that if you really enjoy doing something then it is probably not what God would want you to do. “The heart of man is deceitful and wicked above all things!” (Too dismissive of our desires)

Others may have been taught to be overly optimistic and uncritical with our desires. Under the mantra “Do what you enjoy doing”, we may have assumed that just because we desire it, it is good. (Too trusting of our desires)

So the question becomes:

How much of my desire is a reflection of God’s image in me, and how much is a result of the Fall and in need of transformation?

If only there was a simple way of answering that question for each situation we find ourselves in! But of course that is what walking with Jesus is all about. The more closely we follow him, the more he transforms our desires, bringing them into alignment with his own. They change and grow as we learn more about what life with Jesus is about, and as we refine more clearly our SoulPurpose in company with him.

In summary…

• God created desires in us.

• The Fall has twisted and deformed them.

• Nevertheless, the roots of our desires are healthy and God-formed.

• Some of us need to trust our desires more. Others need to be more discerning.

• The more we walk with Jesus the more he will bring our desires into alignment with his purposes.

The message of Psalm 37:4 is an important part of discovering your SoulPurpose: “Delight in the Lord and he will give you the desires of your heart.”