If we recognize we might be dealing with an issue of unintentional neglect (subject of a recent post – https://pamecrement.com/2024/07/17/unintentional-neglect-3/), we’ve taken the first step toward addressing it. By its very nature, if it’s unintentional we tend to miss it. Or if we get a glimpse of it, we set that tendency aside to do something else.
Addressing this reality won’t be easy and it infects each of us to one degree or another. If we see it, we will look at the issue coming from being forgetful or being in a busy season. Those two reasons may well be valid but it is unlikely to result in changing anything. We might try making a list or setting up a reminder system and those can be helpful but we need to look deeper and making a list can actually compound the problem.
If this issue matters to us, dealing with it begins by making a commitment to be intentional (even in small ways). In that way we develop a habit of being proactive. Some of you might recall this is the first habit Stephen Covey lists in his well-known book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. I had the opportunity to go through a workshop with a staff I was a part of while I was working and value it and recognize why it works as one habit builds upon another.
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I have a high value for relationships and tend to be more proactive in little ways to nourish them. One thing I pay attention to when I am getting to know someone is to learn when that person’s significant dates are (birthday, anniversary, major loss, etc.) and in my contact list along with their names I plug in those dates so they appear in the calendar on my phone. Since my cell phone is generally always with me, it helps nudge my memory. But I know myself and I try to add one other thing to help me be sure I remember that person. I look at the upcoming month and see who is on my calendar for that month and because I am old-fashioned and usually send a card instead of a text or Facebook wish, I choose cards for that month, sign, address and stamp them and arrange them in order to be sent in a place (my dresser) I see every day. That may not be your choice but it is one strategy I use to put Covey’s second habit in place: “begin with the end in mind” which is to be intentional in my relationship.
I want people I care about to know that I see and remember them and intentionally value them (the end in mind) so this is one way I use to practice that habit. Even those folks who are not “card people,” tend to love receiving a card. They are not as common as they once were and yet it can still be an effective way of showing I care.
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Beginning with the end in mind is a principle that can develop into a habit if we are clear on what we value, what we convey, and what we want to be remembered for. It’s a truism that what we do with time as well as money says what we value most.
The third habit of Covey’s is “put first things first.” Some of you accomplish that in many areas by making a list and prioritizing the items on it. Despite what I told you above, I am not a person who likes to make lists. They can feel like tyrants demanding I tackle them on a day where I planned to tackle them but got upended by one thing or another. “To do” lists can be like that for some of us.
This habit works for me if I keep in mind that time is limited and I cannot know how much I can control time or have on any given day and not in a lifetime. For me that means a daily time with God to align my priorities with his for me on that day. It’s where I put “first things first.” I know He knows me best and asking Him where He sees unintentional neglect in my life is the best beginning. My daily prayer is that He will guide how I steward my time. Time is a gift and He is the only one who knows how much I have of it.
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I once heard a graduation speaker say, “If you love life, do not waste time because time is what life is made of.” But that doesn’t mean filling up our minutes and hours being busy in many ways. After all, we are finite. I think he meant not wasting time on less important things. None of us knows when our last interaction with someone will be so wisdom points us to not forget that our words can matter a great deal and we won’t always be able to correct them or amend them. Someone else will live with the memory of them when we are no longer here. How do I, how do you want to be remembered?
“Use your heads as you live and work among outsiders. Don’t miss a trick. Make the most of every opportunity. Be gracious in your speech. The goal is to bring out the best in others in a conversation, not put them down, not cut them out.”
Col. 4:5-6 (MSG)
Unintentional neglect happens when we fail to keep in mind our time, energy, health, and all resources have limits. If our calendars are cluttered, we demonstrate we have forgotten those things and in our current culture we tend to not leave margins or blank spaces that are not only good for us but also allow for the unexpected or God’s nudges for something more important that day.
Most of us have said we fell into unintentional neglect during a busy or hard season and when that season is done, we will get back on track. In my life experience, we tend to have many busy seasons mixed with hard seasons and if we are waiting on a slower paced season, it won’t just happen automatically and may not happen at all left unchecked. Even if it does, the list of chores and neglected tasks will chew up the time.
At my age I am daily seeking to put the important first over what seems like the urgent. As a result organizing my kitchen drawers will take second place to how God wants to order my day. One day I will give an account for how I stewarded my gift of time (the present) and even though messy kitchen drawers bug me and need to be addressed I am not sure they rank high on God’s list.
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These Covey habits I have mentioned go on with “think win-win” that reminds me that my choices need to demonstrate I am thinking of others and not just my own agenda. The next habit is one we all need practice on in our current culture, “seek first to understand, then to be understood.” Most of us would not get a high grade on that one.
Even if we don’t know these 7 habits that also include “synergize” and “sharpen the saw,” if we determine to commit to reducing unintentional neglect in our life, I think choosing even one of them would be a good start. If you haven’t known Covey’s materials on this, check them out.
“The key is in not spending time, but in investing in it.”
It can be so easy. We don’t plan for it to happen. Often our heart’s desire is for the exact opposite, but still it happens. Sometimes unintentional neglect slips into our life unnoticed. It hides just out of the corner of our eye.
Unintentional neglect happens in most of our lives in a myriad of places.
It can happen in caring for our home when we lose track of how long it has been since we really looked at what is growing in our refrigerator. We mean to clean it out periodically, but invariably a soft squishy cucumber (my recent find) or an apple at the back of a drawer doesn’t grab our attention. We are doing so many things that only when we discover the evidence of our neglect do we discover it.
The same issue can crop up with handling our finances. We know the checkbook needs to be balanced and reviewed, but we really don’t want to take time to do it and it gets put off until we have a check bounce or the bank transfers something from a savings account to cover it without asking us first. We may have a budget, but we can so easily forget to keep tabs on how it is doing and where we need to adjust it each month.
We get excited about getting a new or better car and we hear from the salesman all the schedule of maintenance we need to follow to keep it running at its best for as long as possible. Unfortunately, we neglect the odometer as a clue to a need for an oil change and we fail to look at the tread on our tires to notice they needed to be replaced months ago.
And it doesn’t stop there, does it?
Unintentional neglect sneaks into our relational connections as well. Sometimes it sounds as if “out of sight, out of mind” is a truism. We move to a new neighborhood or a new state and those people we felt so close to and saw routinely slip to peripheral vision. We promised to stay in touch. We spent so many special times together, but days slip into weeks and weeks into months and if it continues the relationship fades.
Any move from a job or changing a church does the same thing. If I see you regularly, I am reminded of who you are to me and you stay in focus. It happens when a health issue prevents us from doing what we used to do with someone. Getting together becomes more complicated and we can unintentionally avoid it − dealing with the wheelchair or a walker doesn’t fit our skill set or comfort zone.
Unintentional neglect shows up in whether or not we remember birthdays or significant anniversaries in someone’s life. It’s not about a gift or an extravagant display of some sort, but whether we are remembered that seems to nourish the relationship. It can be a card, a text, a phone call, or a shared cup of coffee.
If you are someone who does pretty well with the things mentioned above, do you also notice and observe the small things, small changes in a person we care about? If so, do you comment or ask or follow-up with the person? Yes, we intend to, but in our own busyness we don’t really see “into” the person or if we do we aren’t sure what to say or ask. How long can we/will we listen and simply be with the person?
Unintentional neglect also can nibble at our relationship with the Lord. We may start a new year with a plan to be disciplined and purposeful about growing and spending time with the Lord beyond going to church, but January may go decently and we fail to notice something interrupted our plan and soon days pass and we have spent no time with Him in any meaningful ways. Our lamps are not filled and the light within us dims.
Unintentional neglect reveals whether our words mean what we convey. It also results in unintentional consequences.
This is why it is so crucial that we be all the more engaged and attentive to the truths that we have heard so that we do not drift off course.
Words comprise language and the knowledge of them equips us to read. Some of us are fascinated by them and study them and their meanings (semantics). Others of us give them little consideration, but words matter. They distinguish us from all other forms of creation.
Research published in 2013 suggests that the average woman speaks 20,000 words per day. “Average” woman implies some speak more and some certainly speak less. Other studies dispute this number and believe it is less. Even so, just imagine if you are a woman thatmany words have come out of your mouth from the first word groggily spoken in the morning until the last sleepy word before nodding off to sleep at night.
That same research suggests the average man by comparison speaks fewer words per day but closer to the number women speak. Such a contrast can already have you scratching your head and considering how much that influences a disconnect that can happen in communication between the genders.
God has created us as the psalmist says “fearfully and wonderfully.” The complexity of the brain begins to take in sounds and words while we are still in the womb. We learn the rhythm and tone of our mother’s voice before she ever holds us in her arms. When she doesspeak to us, she begins to use words and then tell us what they mean.
Mothers tell us the names of our body as they play with our toes and tickle our nose. They tell us the meanings of words that describe feelings. In a very short time before we can speak we come to know and understand a variety of words. Words spoken to us and about us become our first vocabulary, but in a few short years as we begin to learn to read that skill starts to explode our knowledge and use of words. And the amount we read determines how many words we are exposed to and begin to use.
If we read more than 20 minutes a day, we will be exposed to 1.8 million words per year. By comparison if we read just less than five minutes a day, that number drops to 282,000 words in a year and if only a minute a day is used to read we are only exposed to 8,000 words per year.
You might be surprised to learn that even though we think students in school will compose the group who read the most, survey data of Americans show that those who are 75 years old and older actually read the most and that has remained true year over year.
An older 2017 Bureau of Labor Statistics report shows the average length of time we spend reading is 16.8 minutes per day. Compare that to the average length of time of 166.2 minutes per day spent watching TV. That speaks volumes to the words we choose and use regularly.
There are many reasons why words matter and impact us. Scripture speaks of that powerfully in John 1:1:
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”
This verse refers us back to Genesis of course and when we go there, we discover that God spoke (used words) to speak creation into existence until He came to creating humanity.
Scripture has more than one or two verses to remind us of the power of our words and how we should take care to use them. Many of them appear in the book of Proverbs. Here are just a few:
Proverbs 11:9 “Evil words destroy one’s friends; wise discernment rescues the godly.”
Proverbs 11:12 “It is foolish to belittle a neighbor; a person with good sense remains silent.”
Proverbs 11:17“Your own soul is nourished when you are kind, but you destroy yourself when you are cruel.”
Proverbs 15: 1 “A gentle answer turns away wrath, but hard words stir up anger.”
Our words have the capacity to wound or heal, tear down or build up, erode or nourish relationship.
Our words are distinct from us and yet they are also the manifestation of our minds and hearts. Things and the words that describe them are what our thoughts are made up of. They come from what we take in through reading, conversation, and every form of media. The attachments we develop from them help inform our hearts and affection.
Despite being distinct from us, the words we speak tell those who hear those words a great deal about us whether they are spoken casually or with consideration.
Scripture teaches us our words can speak life or death.
These things remind me that I have a great deal of responsibility for the words I speak or write. They also remind me that I need to consider carefully the sources of words I am subjected to daily.
“A good man brings good things out of the good stored up in his heart, and an evil man brings evil things out of the evil stored up in his heart. For the mouth speaks what the heart is full of.”
Virtue is a word we rarely hear used these days and that is indeed unfortunate since there appears to be a great deal of evidence that having more virtue would be good medicine for what ails society at present.
Virtue is derived from the Latin word “virtus” (the personification of which was the deity Virtus), and had the connotations of “manliness,” “honour”, worthiness of deferential respect, and civic duty as both a citizen and a soldier. The word was popular in the early 1800’s and then began to decline in use up to the present time. Perhaps that decline was propelled by more focus on self-actualization and individualism and a disappointment in its absence in the lives of those who were to model it as well as losing track of our heart’s condition.
We wanted so many things and we wanted them to diminish the longings in our hearts that had been ravaged by disease, war, economic collapses, and the breakdown of the family unit. We wanted anesthesia for our hearts, and we found many ways to accomplish that whether through work, play, or chasing after some perceived sense of what “the good life” should be. And we paid little attention to how such an anesthetized heart would lose track of God (much like Israel) and began to search for our desires by means of “less wild lovers” as John Eldredge would say.
Some of these paths resulted in greater loss than we could have imagined and discovery that these other loves had chained us to addictions over which we had less and less control.
In The Sacred Romanceby Brent Curtis and John Eldredge they describe what happens through the power of addiction of any kind:
“Whatever the object of addiction is, it attaches itself to our intense desire for eternal and intimate communion with God and each other in the midst of Paradise – the desire that Jesus himself placed in us before the beginning of the world. Nothing less than this kind of unfallen communion will ever satisfy our desire or allow it to drink freely without it imprisoning it and us. Once we allow our heart to drink water from these less-than-eternal wells with the goal of finding the life we were made for, it overpowers our will and becomes as Jonathan Edwards said, “like a viper, hissing and spitting at God” and us if we try to restrain it.”
Our heart is the battleground.
When we have anesthetized our hearts, we are desperately in need of the only One who can and did offer an escape – Jesus on the cross. And we need a steady supply of virtue that causes us to look upward and out to others rather than to that nagging wanting that has driven us to the dead-end path we can find ourselves on.
If we are (as James K.A. Smith says) what we love, then what we love and practicing seeking after determines a great deal of how the battle for our hearts will go.
Smith makes a great case for what virtues are and what they accomplish in the battle for our heart:
“Virtues, quite simply, are good moral habits. (Bad moral habits, as you might guess, are called “vices.”) Good moral habits are like internal dispositions to the good – they are character traits that become woven into the who you are so that you are the kind of person who is inclined to be compassionate, forgiving, and so forth. Virtues thus are different from moral laws or rules, which are external stipulations of the good.”
Maybe we have missed this crucial understanding as we have passed more and more laws as the answer to helping us all to be better as individuals, citizens, states, and nations. They are all external and we have a plethora of them already that have not accomplished the internal character and virtue we desperately need.
Our pastor recently preached a sermon that reflected that noting that the problems swirling around us today (in whatever part of the world we live or find ourselves) cannot be resolved by any means unless we each and all address the condition of our hearts. And that is something we have left unattended for far too long so that we are sometimes caught up in calling evil good and good evil.
So, if we need more virtue, how does one acquire it in this postmodern era we live in?
Smith’s book that I have referenced says it comes from two key things: imitation and practice. Could it be that as believers we are imitating more of what the world around us is saying and doing than the virtues we ascribe to?
Smith describes the two things we must do as follows:
“First, we learn our virtues through imitation. More specifically, we learn to be virtuous by imitating exemplars of justice, compassion, kindness, and love.
Secondly, acquiring virtue takes practice. Such moral, kingdom-reflecting dispositions are inscribed into your character through rhythms and routines and rituals, enacted over and over again, that implant in you a disposition to an end (telos) that become a character trait – a sort of learned, second- nature default orientation that you tend toward “without thinking about it.” It’s important to recognize that such dispositions are not “natural.” We’re not talking about hardwiring or natural instincts. Virtues are learned and acquired, through imitation and practice. It’s like we have moral muscles that are trained in the same way our biological muscles are trained when we practice a golf swing or piano scales.”
James K.A. Smith in You Are What You Love
It may be that we need more time in the spiritual gym to develop those moral muscles to accomplish what we need. To do that we will need to set aside other “less wild lovers” that we tend toward and be more aware of what we are feeding in ourselves by what we watch or read and who we imitate.
I think Peter understood that when he penned this verse:
“But you are God’s chosen treasure—priests who are kings, a spiritual “nation” set apart as God’s devoted ones. He called you out of darkness to experience his marvelous light, and now he claims you as his very own. He did this so that you would broadcast his glorious wonders throughout the world.”
Success is highly valued in the world today no matter what country, culture, faith, company, ministry, or person. Only the criteria for what would constitute success varies in the list noted. Even as believers we are tempted to chase that illusive benchmark. Some look at quantity as evidence while others insist that quality is the most important. In both cases, we get stuck because how much is enough and what does quality look like?
I wonder why success matters so much to us. If I were to survey a group of people, I would likely get a variety of answers. The real answer might not appear in the list, however, because success is often sought in order to confirm to ourselves that we are enough or we are valuable or we are important. If those roots are true, then success will likely be always just beyond our reach since we will never achieve enough to be certain of who we are, why we are, or what we have done.
Clearly, none of us set out to pursue failure or mediocrity, but the desire for success can be a fickle lover that tempts us to forget the source of our value and purpose if we ever knew it. It can also seduce us into believing that if we achieve anything that somehow it came from us rather than from a gracious God who blessed us and whatever efforts we used to reach some goal set before us. That is but one hazard of success.
Success can also lead us into greater temptation to compare ourselves with others. This is always full of snares. We either determine we are less than or not good enough compared to some other mortal who has as many flaws as we do or we fall prey to seeing ourselves as better than the model we chose to compare ourselves. It points to another example of a hazard.
When success is the primary goal, we make relational choices that are often based on whether or not these persons will add to or help us get to the target goal. In doing so, we may well ignore or overlook a host of warning signs that let us know the relationship may not be good for us. Without consciously acknowledging it, we use the other persons for our own benefit without much regard for him or her. We also expose the reality of our own selfish self-centeredness.
All of these hazards and more can cause us to place our trust in the wrong things and people. If we have read very much of nearly any part of the Bible, we see how common it is for us to fall prey to such hazards. In the Old Testament despite God’s favor and provision for his chosen people, time and again foreign cultures are hired to provide protection and God needs to allow His people to discover their faulty choices. In the New Testament we see the religious leaders of the day trusting in the law and phylacteries when the fulfillment of the law stands in front of them.
Too often we can be tempted to look to someone or something other than the Lord to lead us to success and save us from calamity. We are not so different than our Old Testament brothers and sisters who didn’t seek a personal relationship with God as central/primary and see Him as their leader and source and instead chose flawed earthly kings. They forgot (as we often do) that they were to be citizens of an eternal heavenly kingdom above an earthly one they were trusting.
I recently read a Bible commentator who put it this way:
“Cut off from God’s kingship, the people of God are left with only private religion and personal ambition. God is the king, however, and will not long tolerate seeing his people destroy themselves.”
When we get weighed down by the headlines around the world or our own personal lives and hope for a solution and peace, perhaps the psalmist still says it best:
“Some trust in chariots and some in horses, but we trust in the name of the Lord our God.
They collapse and fall, but we rise and stand upright.”
Psalm 20:7-8 (ESV)
And, by the way, only the Lord’s standard will determine the criteria for success in our lives!
