This is a week of heavy hitters. It’s the feast day of St. Matthew the Evangelist. Wednesday is Padre Pio’s feast day. Thursday is the beatification of Fulton Sheen. And all these heavy hitters might have you feeling inspired, or thinking, “Saints are great…but I sure don’t feel like one of them.”
Stephen Covey, author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, tells about a distraught husband whose marriage was growing cold. The man approached him and said, “My wife and I just don’t have the same feelings for each other anymore. What can I do?”
Like most, that man was living as a passive recipient of his own emotional life; as if he was powerless before how he felt. Covey’s response was beautiful. Here’s the solution: “Love her,” he said.
“But I don’t,” was the reply.
“So do.” He told him to do the things a husband who loves his wife does: listen, empathize, be romantic.
He said, “If our feelings control our actions it is because we have abdicated our responsibility and empowered them to do so.”
How often we don’t “feel it.” And instead of acting the way we WANT to feel, we act out of the way we feel — and all we end up doing is reinforcing the feelings we don’t want!
And we wonder why we get so stuck.
The same is true of our spiritual and moral character.
“I’m not feeling it, Chris!”
So? If you act the way you want to feel your feelings will likely follow. Likewise, pretend to be who you want to be and your whole life will likely follow.
C.S. Lewis wrote a chapter of Mere Christianity called “Let’s Pretend”” His line: “Very often the only way to get a quality in reality is to start behaving as if you had it already.” Like kids playing grown-up, until they are.
This week of great saints, I want to invite you to pretend with me, friends! Matthew did. He was a tax collector when Jesus said, “Follow me.” Tax collectors were hated. For good reason. They collected from their own people for the occupying power and made money by up-charging and pocketing the change. Matthew had no business becoming an evangelist. But he started acting like one. Two thousand years later we’re still reading his Gospel.
If you pretend long enough to be the kind of parent, spouse, friend, and Christian you’d like to be, you’ll become that person.
Spend a little time today envisioning Saint (insert YOUR name here). How is that person different from YOU right now? How will you pretend today?
