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INTRODUCTION:
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Are you alive?
Your breathing
Your talking
You are living
But are you alive?
Your thinking, reasoning.
You are using your senses.
But are you alive?
Before you become irritated with the repetition of
the question let's ask what is meant by being alive.
Alive people are those who are using all of their
human faculties, powers, and talents.
They are using them to the full.
These individuals are fully functioning in their
external and internal senses.
They are comfortable with and open to the full
experience and expression of all human emotions.
Such people are vibrantly alive in mind, heart, and
will.
They see a beautiful world.
They hear its music and poetry.
They smell the fragrance of each new day and taste
the deliciousness of every moment.
Of course their senses are also insulted by ugliness
and offended by odors.
To be fully alive means to be open to the whole human
experience.
Fully alive individuals have activated imaginations
and cultivated senses of humor.
They are alive, too, in their emotions.
They are able to experience the full gamut and galaxy
of human feelings-wonder, awe, tenderness, compassion,
both agony and ecstasy.
Fully alive people are also alive in their minds.
Fully alive people are always thoughtful and
reflective.
They are capable of asking the right questions of
life and flexible enough to let life question them.
Most of all, perhaps, these people are alive in will
and heart.
They truly love and sincerely respect themselves.
All love begins here and builds on this.
Fully alive people are glad to be alive and to be who
they are.
For such people life has the color of joy and the
sound of celebration.
Their lives are not a perennial funeral procession.
Each tomorrow is a new opportunity which is eagerly
anticipated.
There is a reason to live and a reason to die.
A smile will spread throughout their whole being as
their lives pass in review.
And the world will always be a better place, a
happier place, and a more human place because they lived and laughed and loved here.
Fully alive people, precisely because they are fully
alive, obviously experience failure as well as success.
They are open to both pain and pleasure.
They have many questions and some answers.
They cry and they laugh.
They dream and they hope.
The only things that remain alien to their experience
of life are passivity and apathy.
They feel the strong stings of growing-of going from
the old into the new.
They are always moving, growing, beings-in-process,
creatures of continual evolution.
MAIN BODY:
How does one get this way?
How do we learn to join the dance and sing the songs
of life in all of its fullness?
Biblical principles and contemporary wisdom on this
subject can be distilled and formulated into five essential steps to fuller living.
As will be obvious from a description of the steps,
while each one builds on and grows out of the previous steps, none is ever fully and
finally completed.
Each will always remain an ideal to keep us reaching.
In terms of a vision, or basic frame of reference,
each of the five steps is essentially a new awareness or perception.
The more deeply these perceptions are realized, the
more one is enabled to find the fullness of life.
The five steps are (Taken from "Fully Human,
Fully Alive," Dr. John Powell, (Argus Communications):
1. To Accept Oneself.
Fully alive people accept and love themselves as they
are.
They do not live for the promise of some tomorrow or
the potential that may someday be revealed in them.
They usually feel - about themselves as they are the
same warm and glad emotions that are felt when we meet someone whom we really like and
admire.
Fully alive people are sensitively aware of all that
is good in themselves.
Satisfaction is found in little things
Like the way they smile or walk,
Through the natural talents they have inherited,
To the virtues they have worked to cultivate.
When these people find imperfections and limitations
in themselves they are compassionate.
They try to understand, not to condemn themselves.
A joyful self-acceptance, a good self-image, and a
sense of self-celebration are the bedrock beginning of the fountain that rises up into the
fullness of life.
2. Be Oneself.
Fully alive people are liberated by their
self-acceptance to be authentic and real.
Only people who have joyfully accepted themselves can
take all the risks and responsibilities of being themselves.
How often do many of us get seduced into wearing
masks and playing games?
The old ego defense mechanisms are built up to
protect us from further vulnerability.
But they buffer us from reality and reduce our
visibility.
They diminish our capacity for living.
Being ourselves has many implications.
It means that we are free to have and to report our
emotions, ideas, and preferences.
Right or wrong.
Being wrong is not bad, it is only wrong.
Authentic individuals can think their own thoughts,
make their own choices.
They have risen above the nagging need for the
approval of others.
They do not sell out to anyone.
Their feelings, thoughts, and choices are simply not
for hire.
3. Forget Oneself in Loving.
Having to accept and to be themselves, fully alive
people proceed to master the art of forgetting themselves--the art of loving.
They learn to go out of themselves in genuine caring
and concern for others.
We can be at home in the world of reality only to the
extent that we have learned to love it.
Fully alive men and women escape from the dark and
diminished world of self-centeredness, which always has a population of one.
They are filled with an empathy that enables them to
feel deeply and spontaneously with others.
Because they can enter into the feeling world of
others-almost as if they were inside others or others were inside them-their world is
greatly enlarged and their potential for human experience greatly enhanced.
They have become "persons for others," and
there are others so dear to them that they have personally experienced the "greater
love than this" sense of commitment.
They would protect their loved ones with their own
lives.
4. To Believe.
Having learned to transcend purely self-directed
concern, fully alive people discover "meaning" in their lives.
This meaning is found in what Viktor Frankl calls it
"a specific vocation or mission in life."
It is a matter of commitment to a person or a cause
in which one can believe and to which one can be dedicated.
This faith commitment shapes the lives of fully alive
individuals, making all of their efforts seem significant and worthwhile.
Devotion to this life task raises them above the
pettiness and immorality that necessarily devour meaningless lives.
We must find a cause to believe in or spend the rest
of our lives compensating ourselves for failure.
5. To Belong.
The fifth and final component of the full life would
no doubt be a "a place called home," a sense of community.
A community is a union of persons who "have in
common," share in mutuality their most precious possessions--themselves.
They know and are open to one another.
They know "for" one another.
They share in love their persons and their lives.
Fully alive people have such a sense of belonging-to
their families, to their church, to the human family.
There are others with whom such people feel
completely comfortable and at home, with whom they experience a sense of mutual belonging.
There is a place where their absence would be felt
and their deaths mourned.
We need the heart of another as a home for our
hearts.
Fully alive people have the deep peace and
contentment that can be experienced only in such a home.
CONCLUSION:
So this is the profile, the portrait of fully alive
men and women.
Having succeeded in taking the five steps just
discussed, their basic question as they address themselves to life is:
How can I most fully experience, enjoy, and profit
from this day, this person, this challenge?
People like this stand eagerly on the growing edge of
life.
In general they will be constructive rather than
destructive in their words and actions.
They will be flexible rather than rigid in their
attitudes.
They will be capable of constant and satisfying
relationships.
They will be relatively free from the physical and
psychological symptoms produced by stress.
They will perform well, in reasonable proportion to
their talents.
They will prove adaptable and confident when change
is thrust upon them or when they have to make a decision that will change the course of
their lives.
We would all want to be like these people, and all of
us can be more like them.
In the last analysis, it is a question of vision.
This is the vision of God for each of his children.
We are alive, but are we alive?
Speaking of the people of his day Jesus said:
(Matthew 13:14-16 NRSV) With them indeed is fulfilled
the prophecy of Isaiah that says: 'You will indeed listen, but never understand, and you
will indeed look, but never perceive. [15] For this people's heart has grown dull, and
their ears are hard of hearing, and they have shut their eyes; so that they might not look
with their eyes, and listen with their ears, and understand with their heart and turn--
and I would heal them.' [16] But blessed are your eyes, for they see, and your ears, for
they hear.
They were dead, not physically, but mentally and
spiritually
This is why Paul writes the way he does
(Ephesians 2:1-5 NRSV) You were dead through the
trespasses and sins [2] in which you once lived, following the course of this world,
following the ruler of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work among those
who are disobedient. [3] All of us once lived among them in the passions of our flesh,
following the desires of flesh and senses, and we were by nature children of wrath, like
everyone else. [4] But God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he
loved us [5] even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with
Christ...
We are made alive together with Christ.
This is not resurrection.
This is experiencing the fullness of life in all of
life's experiences.
It is this vision that God would have us accept and
apply.
It is our perceptions of God's vision that make us
fragmented or whole.
Health is basically an inner attitude, a life-giving
vision.
May God help us to see, enable us to decide and
empower us to create his vision for us which truly gives us life and makes us alive.