HOUSTON, I HAVE A PROBLEM

One day while channel surfing, I came across a televangelist in his typical milieu – loud, grating, doctrinaire, and oblivious.  Yet, this man caught my attention with one statement – right before I clicked the channel.  Here’s what he said:  

“Life is about duty!”

It wasn’t enough to keep me from changing the channel, but it did penetrate me for some reason.  ”Do I agree?  Duty to what?  Do I know mine?  Should I be self-enrolled in some boot camp?”  

At first, it was easy to equate “duty” to my strategic vision.  After all, my written vision has lots of detail, including business, relational, and personal considerations.  Furthermore, I can easily communicate my vision, explain whom it serves, and in general describe the paths of action to serve them.  

But I still felt incomplete and uncomfortable with the statement about life being about duty.

DON’T USE THAT WORD AROUND HERE

We don’t like the word duty.  It sounds like toil, strife, and inconvenience.  And if you say “Life is about duty!” then it’s a lifelong toil, strife, and inconvenience.  Moreover, it sounds like everything I would be doing – at every moment of the day and night – would need to be contributing to that duty.

My gut says this is true.  But if it’s true, we have a problem.  You might be thinking, “Yeah, it’s called humanity.” But I call it Whateverism.  Whateverism is a loosely held philosophy we have that creeps up on us and stands on our shoulders, whispering convincingly to us.  It says that there’s not enough evidence, power, or influence to compel us to action from moment to moment.  There’s no script, manifesto, or guideline that holds us to a standard.  Furthermore, there’s always some distraction that might be connected loosely to productivity that can occupy my time and attention.  This allows me to work in spurts – whenever I feel like it – on whatever project I want.  

The result, unfortunately, is that after a frustrating stretch of failure, we sigh in resignation, saying, “WHATEVER!  I WORKED HARD THIS WEEK.  WHAT MORE DO YOU WANT FROM ME?”

The problem with Whateverism is that it is easily toppled by logic, existential evidence, and life experience.  It can be squashed by using simple metrics for efficiency and productivity.  If everyone’s slider (above) were all the way to the right, the world would be an even bigger disgrace.  There would be a long, tragic list – everything from business fraud to infrequent trash pickup.

But what would the world be like if everyone’s slider were all the way to the left?  Duty-o-rama to the max?  I have to say it might just fix everything.  But we would need to redefine the word ‘duty’ (a dangerous task).  This is simply because people equate ‘duty’ with ‘oughts’ – and an infinite obligation to ‘oughts’ produces death.  

An obvious counterbalance that must also be in the ‘Max Duty’ equation:  mercy.  If the duty slider were all the way to the left, then this slider would have to be at least 3/4 to the right:

CONCLUSION

If you believe my earlier assertion that we all have a fabric/DNA/calling, then we have to identify with that to be satisfied with our lives.  Unless someone’s mission had harmful intent (e.g. terrorists/thieves) then this has to be a winning philosophy.  But the danger is that a failure in our duty carries penalties.  We suffer.  Others suffer.  We crucify ourselves because we are human.  This is sad!  That’s why mercy is so vital, both outwardly (to others) and inwardly (to ourselves).  

So, life is about duty.  But it cannot be lived without mercy.

Maybe I should take my message to TBN.  Oh wait, no thanks!