When you see a small child who is out of control, you might describe them as being full of energy. Certainly as a parent I have seen that different children have different levels of energy. Some of this is clearly genetic, yet a great aspect of our energy is connected to how we approach life and whether we have found a life that energizes us.
I want to be perfectly transparent: I don’t always have endless energy. In fact, even as I write these words, I feel an exhaustion that has drilled its way to the core of my bones. I am really tired. Not Olympic athlete kind of tired, but that kind of weariness of the soul that makes you feel as if you’re drowning in a black hole of exhaustion. Have you ever been there?
It is one thing to revel in a moment in which you have boundless energy, but that is not the measure of your strength. The warrior knows their strength only when standing in their weakness. That is why it’s critical to assess what things in your life bring you energy and what steals it away. Our need for energy in order for us to live at an optimal level has become a common part of our everyday language.
Every morning millions of people wake up with one goal: to get that first cup of coffee that will give them the strength to get to their second cup of coffee. And while coffee may work well as your addiction, it is much more than that. Coffee, at its essence, is concentrated energy classified as caffeine. That orange juice you drank is energy. In fact everything you consume is energy.
Today we have an entire industry developed around the convenient consumption of energy. We have energy drinks and energy bars and even energy coaches. We have all learned the hard lesson that a child must never be given unfettered access to candy. Sugar is pure energy. We’ve also come to understand the relationship of energy to our physical health.
If you consume more energy than you expend, your body begins to store that energy as fat. Over the past few years, an endless number of programs and strategies have emerged for weight loss. Yet there’s one simple formula that will always remain true: if you expend more energy than you consume, you will lose weight. If you consume more energy than you expend, you will gain weight. You are both a conduit of energy and a container of energy. And as perplexing as it may seem, even if you have chosen a life of lethargy, you are still at your core a ball of energy.
So how can it be that we are energy and can live unenergized lives? Have you ever tried to start a fire with wet wood or wet coals? The material that would normally burn easily and brightly loses its capacity to produce heat and create fire. There are conditions of the human spirit that steal from us not only our energy but our passion and desire to live life fully.
The warrior knows that the type of fuel that feeds their soul affects the fire that burns within them. Sometimes the fire is diminished, and sometimes it is misdirected. The warrior chooses the right fuel for their fire. The warrior knows that their heart is the furnace. The warrior knows that their passion is their source of strength. The warrior knows this one truth: if they lose their fire, they lose their strength.
Nothing will steal our strength like living lives we do not love. To pursue what we love is to be energized for life. If we cannot find the energy to live, we have not found love worth living for. Warriors have found boundless energy, for they have found boundless love. There is a direct relationship between what we are doing and the energy we have to do it. Everyone has an energy grid. The way we store energy is through our desires, values, passions, hopes, dreams, and aspirations, and ultimately our greatest capacity for energy storage is through what we love.
Rolling Blackouts
I have always found it unsettling that people can actually live their lives without passion. Over many years of working with leaders and mentoring potential ones, I have come to realize that people do not all bring the same level of energy with them. I have also come to know that even within our own lives, we each can experience massive variance in the amount of energy we feel or have available to engage life’s greatest challenges and crises.
I remember a few years ago when I had been traveling for about two weeks and it was my first night home. I walked in the door, and just after I said hello, Kim responded with “Would you mind taking out the garbage?” After decades of marriage, I should have been able to translate that to its original meaning: I’m so happy you’re home. I love you, and I need your help so badly, more than words could ever express. That, for those of you who can’t read between the lines, was everything she was saying when she said, “Would you take out the garbage?”
My response, though, was less than I would have hoped for myself. I looked at her, frustrated and exhausted from my long journey, and said, “I just walked in the door. I’m really tired. Could you just let me rest for a while?” She immediately felt terrible and said, “Of course. I’m sorry. Just sit down and catch your breath.”
Then a few minutes passed, and one of my friends gave me a call. He said they had a basketball gym available and a bunch of the guys were going to go play ball and wanted to know if I could jump in. I immediately knew that I was in a tenuous situation, so I said, “Let me give you a call back. I need to ask Kim if it would be okay if I go.” I want to add a little footnote here. I don’t need my wife’s permission to go play basketball, but I do need it if I want to be happy and live a long and fruitful life.
I remember walking cautiously over in Kim’s direction. I think she was cooking something. I said, “Honey, after I take out the garbage, I was wondering if I could go play basketball with the guys.” I could see the fire in her eyes.
She said, “Oh no, I would never let you do that. You’re so tired. You’re way too tired to go play basketball. You don’t even have the energy to take out the garbage. You just sit down and rest.”
I can’t really explain what happened. I was exhausted when she asked me to take out the garbage, but suddenly I was filled with energy, enough energy to play basketball and take out the garbage. She should have seen this as nothing short of a miracle, a gift from God.
Now, you might think that I was being selective, but actually something unique was happening. The things we love to do energize us; the things we do not enjoy doing cost us energy. It goes much further than the conflict between taking out the garbage and playing basketball. Every day of your life, you either choose to give yourself to those things that give you energy or you choose to give yourself to those things that cost you energy.
In the nearly thirty years that we have lived in Los Angeles, we have faced numerous energy crises across the state of California. Two phrases that I have become familiar with are brownouts and rolling blackouts. With the first, you have limited access to energy. With the second, you experience temporary losses of energy. During those periods, we were constantly reminded that it is possible to expend more energy than you actually have. We experienced similar conditions in Beirut, where the loss of energy often came without notice and at the most inconvenient times.
If we are not careful, we can experience the same phenomenon in our personal lives. Every day we make choices to conserve energy, expend energy, consume energy, and restore energy. Even when we are energized by life, it will still deplete us of energy. The things that energize us can also exhaust us.
Energizing and exhausting are not diametrically opposed. The things that give you energy also cost you energy, but that cost has a return. The things that energize you the most might actually cost you the most energy. They might be the hardest things that you do. They might be the most difficult challenges in your life. But when they are energizing, you do not find yourself in a deficit of energy, because whatever it costs you, the return is greater.
I love playing basketball, and I can say that it genuinely energizes me. It also leaves me absolutely exhausted and depleted of energy. I love writing books. I’m always energized when I tackle a new project, and it always leaves me both exhilarated and exhausted. When my kids were five and eig
ht years old, they were the most adorable creatures on the planet. Nothing brought me greater joy than spending time with them and enjoying their endless energy. They were also exhausting. And I think it’s fair to say that parenting may be the most difficult job in the world.
Just because you love something doesn’t mean it doesn’t cost you something. In fact the opposite can be true. You may be so passionate about a project that you give every ounce of energy that you have to it. The difference between those things that energize us, that cost us energy, and those things that steal our energy is that one is a result of a creative process and the other simply consumes our strength without benefit.
When I’m doing accounting, there is nothing about it that energizes me. When I have to deal with a staff member who’s not executing at the expected level, it sucks the life out of me. Worry steals energy; fear steals energy; anger steals energy. Each in its own way creates a negative energy, what you might call a dark energy. It’s like a black hole that consumes all the energy within your soul. Even good things that you were not meant to do can steal your energy. Certainly, living a life without purpose or engaging in work that you find meaningless will rob you of all the energy you need to live.
Some of us have become accustomed to living with “rolling blackouts.” We go to work with a deficit of energy and live for the weekends, when we can pursue our passions. Isn’t that the tragedy of why we “thank God it’s Friday”? What a shame to work five days simply so that we can live two.
When you find yourself taking on projects or responsibilities for which you are not passionate, you will need to find a way to replenish the energy that you lost fulfilling those responsibilities. Ironically, this is why you must choose your battles carefully. If you fight a battle that actually doesn’t matter to you, it will steal your strength. The warrior finds their strength because they fight only battles that matter.
Emotional Energy
Does your life energize you, or does it steal every ounce of strength you need simply to exist? In my experience, most of us experience life in unrealistic extremes. We either love our lives or hate them. We either have lives we long for or long for different ones completely. We are either completely energized by the lives we have or completely drained by them. We experience life in extremes, but that’s not the reality in which we live.
Hopefully you can find something to love even about the things you hate. Even when people hate their jobs, they often find a way to compensate by living the lives they love on the weekends. The problem is that it is impossible to segment your life on a permanent basis. If you hate your job but love your marriage, eventually one will affect, and infect, the other. If you are unhappy in your relationships, that unhappiness will begin to affect every other area of your life.
Negative emotions such as bitterness, unforgiveness, jealousy, envy, and even greed will send your energy in a direction that does not replenish your soul but in fact leaves you feeling lifeless and empty. But it’s not just negative emotions. You were never intended to live life in neutral. To live a life that leaves you feeling indifferent or apathetic is the path to a slow death. If getting up in the morning is a struggle and you find yourself lacking the energy to engage life fully, you can be certain that you are not living the life you were created to live.
You are created to live a life of passion and compassion. When you live a life of passion, it moves you to action. When you live a life of compassion, it moves you beyond yourself into a life of service. Negative emotions turn all your energy inward and you become an emotional black hole. When you live a life of passion, you harness your energy to be fully engaged in the creative process called life.
The more passion you have for something, the more energy you have to give to it. Those who seem to have boundless energy are the ones living their lives for their deepest passion. Where then does passion come from? Passion is love on fire. This is why the warrior knows this to be true—that love is the most powerful force in the world, that love is the warrior’s greatest strength, that the way of the warrior is always love.
The warrior has mastery over their internal world. The warrior understands the process required to expend, preserve, and renew their energy. They know that their energy flows out of their passions, that their passion must flow out of love, that it is love that gives them ultimate joy, and that it is joy in which they find their strength. The way of the warrior has no room for anger or hate or violence. Those are the emotions of weaker men. The strength of the warrior comes not in hate but in love, not in anger but in joy, not in greed but in passion.
The warrior who has found ultimate joy can overcome anything. They have learned that the struggles of life are more than one can bear without joy. Scripture tells us that the joy of the Lord is our strength.70 For all the battles we will fight, for all the struggles we will face, for all the wounds we will bear, only those people who are full of joy will find the strength to rise above them. To live a life of passion fueled by love and joy is to be fully alive.
Negative emotions pose as fuel or passion. And although they do cause you to burn, they do not lead you to create but rather to destroy. Anger can look like passion; hate can look like intention; greed can look like motivation. Dark emotions such as hate, anger, and greed redirect energy into a destructive force. In fact all they do is steal your future and turn your soul not into a fire but a pit of ashes.
I was born in San Salvador, El Salvador. I came to the States as a child and was unable to return to my homeland for many years because of my country’s history of violence. Most of the world knows El Salvador as a land of war and endless revolutions. Only out of a history that has known nothing but war and violence could an expression of our inhumanity have been created in the likes of the international criminal gang MS-13. Children with so much promise and potential, young men with incredible intelligence and talent facing hopeless futures and fueled by rage and greed, became the founders of one of the world’s most violent and inhumane gangs. Negative emotions can make us forces, but no matter how much power we may acquire, it will never turn us into creative forces. Movements born out of anger, hatred, fear, or greed only harness our energy to make us destructive forces.
There are other negative emotions that move us not into a pattern of destructiveness but one of lethargy and apathy. Nothing will steal your energy like worry and fear. Worry consumes your energy without productivity. I have spent too many moments of my life worrying, far more than I would ever care to admit, yet I can say without exception that my worry has never made anything better. Worry is a waste of energy. Emotions such as anxiety and stress are the result of unharnessed energy misdirected by our fears and doubts. Fear feels like a fire except that it does not create light, only darkness. When we are afraid, our energy is consumed by the darkness of our souls. Fear is like a black hole consuming all the light. It steals all our energy and leaves us powerless.
It is the same with doubt. When you doubt, you hesitate. When the warrior hesitates, he faces certain defeat. We are told that “one who doubts is like a wave of the sea, blown and tossed by the wind. That person should not expect to receive anything from the Lord. Such a person is double-minded and unstable in all they do.”71
When you doubt, your energy wars against itself. It becomes unharnessed and unfocused and loses its power. There is a strength that comes when you have confidence that even if you fail, you’ve given yourself to the right battle. We spend too much of our lives trying to make sure we are right about the what, the where, the when, and the how, and too little time making sure we are right about the why. The why is the one battle you need to be right about. This is the one area you cannot afford to be wrong about. You can be uncertain about everything else, but you need to know your why.
Your why is the light that will guide your way.
Your why is the light that moves you forward in the darkness.
Your why is why you are alive.
If you don’t know your why, you will merely exist and not live. Your why is your truth, and when you know the truth, it sets you free. When you know your why, you know your strength.
Your why gives meaning to the struggle.
Your why gives purpose to every battle.
Your why brings intention, even to your suffering.
When you know the why to your life, you find the strength to live.
It shouldn’t surprise us that when we live in the light, we find our greatest energy. And the contrary is also true. When we live in darkness, we lose our strength. The greatest darkness is to have no meaning for our lives. To live without meaning is to walk in darkness.
Far too much of human history has been written by individuals fueled by the wrong passions. Dictators, tyrants, and despots have marked the human story with destruction and despair. The unwritten backdrop of these stories is that there were endless multitudes powerless to do anything about the violence that overtook them. A careful study of history reminds us that there are often those who had it within their power to end violence, to end injustice, and to end poverty. The painful truth is they simply didn’t care enough to act.
Those fueled by greed and hatred will always prevail if their only opposition are those living in apathy and indifference. The great wealth of the world will always be held in the wrong hands if only the greedy are driven to create wealth. Too much of history has been paved by those with destructive intentions. Yet for me, this is not the greatest tragedy of the human story. The great tragedy is the backstory that remains untold. We are simply watching history happen before our very eyes rather than choosing to pay the price to change its course. The future will be created by those who have the courage to create it. A better world will happen only if we find the strength and energy to give our lives to it.
The Way of the Warrior Page 12
