Last week, I began to talk about the first question in a series of questions I plan to discuss. If you didn’t read it, it is called Who are you? This post, which focuses on the second question, will make more sense if you read the first one.
What do you want? At first, I thought this was a stupid question to ask. It doesn’t matter what I want, it matters what God wants. OR I just want what I want. I can’t change my desires. But then I asked myself, “what do I really want? Do I even know what I want?” The answer to this question begins with what I want in the moment. It could be food or maybe sleep. What do I want tomorrow? Perhaps what I want is money or being well-liked. Maybe I want praise. But then what do I want for my life? What do you want? Do you even know what you want?
Plato once said: “Human behavior flows from three main sources: desire, emotion, and knowledge.”
Desire. The way you act can depend on what you want. “What? How is this helpful, Duncan?” Alright, let’s say that you want money. It is likely that your behavior, over time, will begin to form around this desire. Ask yourself why you want what you want. Why do you want money? Is it because you think it will make you happy? I think the real reason that I have a desire for money is because it makes me comfortable. I would like to have this comfort. Having money makes things easy. But maybe your desire is not for money. Perhaps you just want to be liked. If being liked is your desire, then you have to change your behavior so that people will like you. This is something I used to find myself guilty of. I would often find myself changing the way I joked or talked when I was around other people. Then I realized two things: God doesn’t want me to be someone else and people like people who are real more than people who alter their behavior to be liked.
Let’s get back to the point. What do you want? Why do you want that? Really ask yourself these questions. I think that for me, a lot of times I try to justify the things that I want without ever actually asking myself why I want them. St. John Paul the Great said:
“People are made for happiness. Rightly, then, you thirst for happiness. Christ has the answer to this desire of yours. But he asks you to trust him. True joy is a victory, something which cannot be obtained without a long and difficult struggle. Christ holds the secret of this victory.”
What we are all ultimately searching for is happiness. When you ask yourself these questions, try to figure out if your desires will help you toward this goal which Christ calls us to achieve.
Just my thoughts.
Go with God
Duncan Tiemeyer
