Email: Spiritual priorities [VI]

Try putting first things first. I put my priorities in the following order: health, spirituality, livelihood/career, family/home, pursuits/education, social/outreach. This is because you must have health in order to keep living and do anything else in the first place; spirituality gives your life a higher purpose and direction; you need to earn a living or you can't get food and shelter or care for your family; pursuits (study/education) help further your life direction; and having a social life and outreach (church/ministry/community service) helps you stay grounded and give back to others.

Many Christians would prioritize differently -- God, family, church, work, self -- and that is fine for the big picture in altruism, but we are called to be martyrs every day, in little ways and over the long haul. We can't live an entire life always putting ourselves last; at the very least, we end up dividing that rule into halves, because we do make sure we get enough sleep and so on over the long haul.

Of course, practically speaking, I do follow those priorities: Ignoring my already-met basic needs (sleep, food, shelter), I give myself to God each day; if my child needs food and there is only enough for one, I will go hungry; and so on. We all know what to choose when there is a really clear-cut choice between one or the other. But in most of modern life, where we can have all of these things at once -- health, faith, income, family and so on -- then I think it behooves us to humbly recall the order in which the Lord gave them to us. I'm still working these ideas out. What do you think?

Many authors besides Allan Loy McGinnis in The Romance Factor say what they say against idealizing romantic love because they believe divine love must come first. And I agree, esp. among people of faith. Yet again, this is not an all-or-nothing battle: The options are not faith-only or romance-only. Faith should come before romance, but in a healthy person's life, each one nurtures and feeds the other -- in the same way that having had loving, caring parents nurtures and feeds our relationship with God as our heavenly paterfamilias. Nor does each one come wrapped in a trim, unchanging package; parental love, faith love, and romantic love will continue to inform our hearts and each other throughout our lives. I'm not suggesting which is which, but think of these three as a comfortable pair of shoes, a walking stick (or a canteen), and a compass; you wouldn't want to be on a journey without any one of these. And the blessing of it all is that we don't have to lose one to keep the other.