Rules for Living Life – The Introduction

There are moments in life that stand out: crystal-clear mental images so perfectly preserved you have no choice but to believe that they have real significance.  Do you know what I mean?  These images are like pictures, taken, frozen in time, and placed in the photo album of my mind. These images periodically pop up in my mind to remind me of something I risk forgetting.

I am not sure why, but for me, many of these mental snapshots are snippets from movies, songs, or television shows.  It disturbs me on so many levels that what I seem to retain is mass media but I have come to a reluctant acceptance that this is how my brain separates the barrage of images I see from the few choice morsels that are supposed to shape my life.  (But don’t get me started about advertising jingles…)

One of these scenes comes from the movie, Meet the Parents.  In the scene, the protagonist, Greg Focker (Ben Stiller), is meeting his fiancée’s previous boyfriend, Kevin Rawley (played by Owen Wilson).  As the wealthy and successful Kevin is rapidly, but naively, shaming Greg (who is a male nurse – a job only marginally more impressive than garbage collector according to his fiancée’s ominous father, Jack Byrnes), the group heads out to Kevin’s wood shop to learn about Kevin’s latest hobby: carpentry.  Greg asks Kevin what got him interested in carpentry.  Kevin’s response is one of those moments for me:

“I guess I would have to say Jesus.  He was a carpenter, and I just figured if you’re going to follow in someone’s footsteps, who better than Christ?”

Now I am no carpenter. But what strikes me about the line is the sentiment.  Who better to pattern your life after than Jesus of Nazareth?

I am also pretty sure that if Kevin is using carpentry as his model for following the life of Jesus, he missed the mark of who Jesus was. So in lieu of blindly following Kevin into a life of sawdust and flattened thumbs, I chose instead to read a lot about this man, Jesus, and see what he really stood for: what was his ethos.  All so I could learn ways I could model my life after him.

Fast forward to a few years ago when I was sitting in yet another completely useless, soul-sucking meeting at work when I realized I had to do something or else I was going to explode. And not in a productive way.  So I started writing down a list of things I could, and should, be doing to improve the situation around me.  I called it “The Solution Matrix.”

I printed out this list of eight things I could do at work to help make everything better. I posted the matrix on my desk and looked at it daily as a way to motivate and center myself.

After a couple of years spent staring at this list, and a lot of scripture reading, I realized that I needed to merge these two things: my Solution Matrix, and my desire to model my life after Christ.  So I took the Solution Matrix and merged it with my understanding of both the teachings of Christ and how he interacted with the world.

And thus was born a new list: Rules for Living Life (Lessons from the Life of Jesus).

I have been staring at this list on my desk for about two years now and honestly, I am pretty happy with them.  No, they are not perfect, but they are a way I can motivate and guide myself when my mental compass needs adjustment. And before you ask: no, I am not good at following them. They are far more perfect than I am at following them, but I do consistently recognize how following them would have helped me when things go awry.

So now I will share them with you.

I know that many people are not fond of Christ-based morality codes.   This is not intended to be one.  This is not about morality per say, but about being present in your own mortality.  And (spoiler alert!) they are also not about living the “happiest” life. Some of these Rules do not ensure you get the best of every situation. And they are no guarantee that you will get farther up the ladder, earn more money, or achieve more commercial success. After all, they are patterned after a guy who got killed for what he stood for.

If you are uncomfortable with this topic, feel free to skip past the posts that share this title.  There will be more to read later, but for now I want to work on putting these thoughts out into the ether and hopefully some of them will resonate with you.

I put a caveat at the bottom of the Rules that I will repeat here: “You are wandering through a darkened city at night with a pen-light: you are only seeing a part of the landscape.” This is not the map of the city – but for me, this is a small light to help shine a few feet into the darkness ahead. Keep that in mind as you are reading and just maybe this will make some sense.