I think Elisabeth Elliott is the one who coined the phrase, but someone more learned than me can confirm.

“A heart at ease with itself.”

It’s one that has done the great work of self-forgetfulness to the point of freedom. Joy. Ease.

In this world, it feels somedays, impossible.

But the more I live, the more I learn, and I’ve come to believe that the idea of self-forgetfulness is not a task, obligation, or requirement, but an invitation. The greatest invitation to the greatest party. It’s an open door to a place of ease. The free vacation of which we’ve dreamt, again and again. It may have felt like a pipe dream and yet here it is, set on the table before us if only we choose to eat of it.

And that’s where the grand invitation becomes something harder than we wished it would be. That’s the snag, the catch, the fine print.

We actually have to choose it.

We have to do the hard, seemingly impossible work of forgetting ourselves.   

IN OUR RELATIONSHIPS

Forgetting ourselves in our relationships – romantic and otherwise – lies in the Biblical definition of love found in 1 Corinthians. It is, in itself, all the instruction we need in order to be self-forgetful when it comes to those God has put in front of us to love. And although this scripture is often quoted at weddings and is, of course, relevant to marriage relationships, it should be noted that in its original context it was a guide for how the people of Corinth were to love one another. They’d been getting in squabbles and wasting energies on petty arguments and misunderstandings and Paul was writing to correct them. To coach them and encourage them out of pettiness. That’s where this scripture originates, well outside the context of romantic relationships, but a guide nonetheless for any relationship into which you’ve been called.

“Love is patient and kind; it does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things; believes all things; hopes all things. Love never ends.” 1 Corinthians 13: 4-8

 Look – it is so easy to be concerned about ourselves in our relationships. Especially in the world we live in where we’re constantly being told to look out for ‘number one’. We are not encouraged into Biblical love, we’re encouraged to serve ourselves, choose ourselves, and do everything we can to protect our own interests.

Read the scripture again and you will see, it is a directive in the opposite direction.

Consider the last argument you had with a loved one. How easy was it to be patient or kind? Arrogance and rudeness come so easy. Insisting on our own ways and becoming irritable and resentful is exactly what our spirits want to do. It’s where we want to live. It’s where I want to live.

These charges are so difficult to attain because every one of them asks us to forget ourselves.

We must lose sight of our own timing in order to be patient. We must forget the insults and arrows that come flying our way if we are to offer kindness across a hostile battlefield line. We will need to completely forget what we perceive as our own needs or wants in order to release insisting on our own ways. We will be required to forget our own egos, and our pride, if we are going to forego the opportunities to return rudeness for more rudeness. And we will never avoid becoming resentful or holding our loved ones in contempt unless we can forget entirely what we feel we are owed – what we want to demand as our rights.

It’s easy to get lost in the checklist of character traits we perceive as too righteous for us to ever be able to achieve, but if we narrow the list down to this one thing – to forget ourselves – we will begin moving toward Biblical love without even realizing it’s happening.

In the next squabble, or the next tiff, or the next knock-out full-on brawl with our closest, I wonder what it would look like to seek self-forgetfulness. How would it change our conversations or our tones or our language or our pride response or our ego response or the way we view a situation? I wonder, if we could forget ourselves, how it could change our relationships.

(It must be said, and I hate that it does, but there is a time when self-forgetfulness is not the answer, and that time is abuse. Recognize it and care for yourself.)

IN OUR WORK

Our work is a silent giant for most of us, whether we recognize it or not.

The truth is that we say our families are the most important thing in our lives, but we constantly make decisions for our jobs instead. Where we live, who we spend time with, where spend our most valuable time and energy – we choose for our jobs first, and our families second.

For most of us, if we’re being honest, our work is our priority. And as such, it is devastatingly easy to be entirely consumed by it, and indirectly so, to be consumed in ourselves. It is a climb up a steep mountain to have a heart at ease with itself when it is inordinately consumed by achievement.

Achievement is one of the easiest places to claim identity, to find validation, and to self-affirm. It’s the most natural place from which to derive purpose (and appropriately so!). But when work becomes ultimate (as Tim Keller would say), then it has become our master. It has become what we worship. It has become the singular place where we are defined. If work is okay, I am okay. If it’s not okay – I’m not okay.

The trouble with that model is that our work can be taken away from us any time, any day, in a multitude of ways. So if our identity, purpose, validation, and affirmation lie in the hands of our achievements and then we don’t achieve, we’re setting ourselves up for a world of disappointment and hurt. Someone could lose a job, or lose the ability to do their job, or get in an accident, or get sick, or need to move to care for a family member, or they could hire someone new, or pick someone better, or any number of other things that could strip us of our ability to achieve in a heartbeat. And then what?

If we’ve been so consumed in becoming ‘someone’ through our work and that is somehow affected, we lose way more than an income.

Incomes can be replaced. Identities are far rarer and much more difficult to find.

To have a heart at ease with itself is to be self-forgetful. To be self-forgetful in our work we must understand, with every cell in our bodies, that we cannot and will not find our soul’s fulfillment there. We can’t find our personal value there. We can experience purpose in our work and the purpose that sticks – the purpose that makes people want to keep coming back – is the purpose that exists outside of filling ourselves.

If an NBA basketball player gets critically injured but understands his purpose is to inspire youth – he will find another way to inspire youth without doing it from the court. If a CEO understands her purpose to be creating healthcare solutions for the underprivileged and she’s fired by the board, she’ll find a new way, a new company, a new road to pave for new healthcare solutions. If a musician understands his purpose to share the gospel through his music and he can’t play a guitar anymore, he’ll keep writing songs or start speaking or find another way to share the gospel with his audience.

The ‘why’ cannot be overcome when it exists for more than filling our own chests.

What that leaves us with is what we do now. Today. How we interact with the people we work with and lead. How we pour into our work, understanding that it has the power to grant us a sense of purpose but that it cannot be the place where we find our identities – because it can be taken away in a breath.

It’s in this place, the place of purpose apart from identity, that we can be free to forget ourselves. Purposes are adjustable. They bend according to supply and demand. They evolve with pandemics and birth announcements and economic swings. Identity is not so fluid. Identity is core. It’s root to our tree. Cornerstone to our foundation. It moves, and the whole building shifts (or crumbles, as the case may be). Identity must exist outside of purpose, outside of work, outside of achievement. It must exist in something lasting and eternal and unchangeable. Inviolable.

Identity apart from our work is the freedom to dive in with our entire selves, without it defining us. We can stop worrying about our level of achievement because it can’t fill us. We can work free from the pressure of someone else’s definition of success because we are not measured by the success of our work. Work becomes then, merely a part of what makes us who we are and a guide for how life sends us on in the directions we will inevitably go.

Our strivings to be someone can rest. Our efforts to prove ourselves to a world that does not care and will likely never know who we are, can die peacefully. A heart at ease with itself is a heart that knows that whatever work we are given to do here is beautiful and wonderful and worth it, but it cannot now, nor can it ever, fill our souls.

Self-forgetfulness in our work is freedom and it will only be achieved by identifying what we’re made to do, and doing it with joy and purpose and mission, yet knowing fulfillment, identity, and value apart from our measures of perceived success.

Work is good. We were created to work – as far back as Adam in the garden – and I believe we were created to get joy and satisfaction out of our work well done. But I do not believe we can enjoy the freedom of self-forgetfulness if our identities are found in our works. It puts too great a burden on something that is not structurally built to withstand it.

Only in finding and placing our identities in something everlasting will we truly and rightly be able to experience the joy and satisfaction intended for us in our work. Only then will we find a heart at ease with itself.

love, Nic

“A Heart at Ease with Itself, Part II” coming soon…