The Lies We Believe

by Dr. Chris Thurman

  “Like what?”

  “Right now we live in a really nice home, but we’ve got our eyes on an even more expensive one. It’s in an even nicer neighborhood and all. My wife really wants to move. But the mortgage, I have to admit, will put a lot of pressure on me.”

  “And that pressure is something you wouldn’t like?”

  “Well, keeping up financially with all that we currently have is enough pressure by itself, but this would cause even more.” He ran his hand through his head of distinguished gray hair. “If we don’t move, my wife will be very disappointed.”

  “She’s pressuring you?” I asked.

  “Yes . . . but I want to move too.”

  “In spite of all that you have, it isn’t making you very happy,” I added.

  “I’m embarrassed to admit it, but it’s true,” he said, glancing down at the floor, then back up at me. “Sounds bad, doesn’t it? I mean, having all that we do never seems to stop our desire for more. We never seem to say no to ourselves anymore. The more we have of what we thought would make us happy, the more miserable we get.”

  Tim was living proof that no one has it all even when he looks as if he does. He had said yes to a number of things in life (a big home, lots of expensive stuff, exciting trips), but without even seeing it, he was simultaneously saying no to a number of more important things in life (peace of mind, a reasonable work life, time with his family). No one has it all, even the people who seem to have it all.

  The best case study for the ultimate futility of the “you can have it all” lie can be found in the Bible. If anyone had it all, the great King Solomon did. Our man Solomon was the John D. Rockefeller, Albert Einstein, and Hugh Hefner of his day all rolled into one very special person. He was the wealthiest and most intelligent man on earth, had hundreds of wives and concubines, and denied himself no worldly pleasure. Listen to him describe his life:

  I made my works great, I built myself houses, and planted myself vineyards. . . . I made myself water pools. . . . I had greater possessions of herds and flocks than all who were in Jerusalem before me. I also gathered for myself silver and gold and the special treasures of kings and of the provinces. I acquired male and female singers, the delights of the sons of men, and musical instruments of all kinds. So I became great and excelled more than all who were before me in Jerusalem. Also my wisdom remained with me. Whatever my eyes desired I did not keep from them.1

  I don’t know about you, but I’d consider that having it all. I would love to have the life King Solomon had, wouldn’t you? Man, would that be something! With all that going for him, you’d think Solomon would have been one happy and content fellow, right? Well, listen to some of the conclusions he reached:

  • “The abundance of the rich will not permit him to sleep.”2

  • “He who loves silver will not be satisfied with silver.”3

  • “I have seen all the works that are done under the sun; and indeed, all is vanity and grasping for the wind.”4

  In Solomon’s efforts to have it all, he had everything but the one thing that completes it—contentment. The end result of the “you can have it all” lie is tremendous dissatisfaction, even ungratefulness, with what you do have and a vain “grasping for the wind” in trying to find greater happiness through having more. Like Solomon, many of us live our lives around the adage that “the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence,” and we work hard to get on that other side. The only problem is, when we get to the other side of the fence, we find out that we can’t have it all there, either.

  The apostle Paul had the right attitude when he penned these very wise words: “For we brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out. And having food and clothing, with these we shall be content.”5Isaac Bickerstaffe, a man from a later century, put it this way: “If I am content with little, enough is as good as a feast.” Those are great truths to live by.

  I wish I could say we are a country “content with little,” but the truth of the matter is, we are a country that demands and expects a feast. We are rarely, if ever, satisfied with what we have and seem to always be looking around for more. Keeping up with the Joneses is not so much an attitude as it seems to be a birthright.

  The “have it all” lie is a destructive delusion that cheapens life, making us anxiously live for the future rather than appreciate and enjoy the present. Very few of us are immune to it, but all of us have a choice whether to live by it. We can fight always having to have more to be happy. We can fight the part of us that believes we are entitled to everything we lay our eyes on. We can realize that to say yes to one thing in life is actually a choice to simultaneously say no to something else. We can learn to be content with little so that we gratefully receive enough as a feast.

  “My Worth Is Determined by My Performance.”

  “I haven’t closed a deal in months,” said Ted, who is a real estate salesman. Things were rolling along fine in his life until the real estate market went belly-up. Because he was depressed and couldn’t shake it, he came to see me.

  “We keep dipping into savings to get by. That can’t last forever,” he moaned. He sat hunched over his knees, his hands massaging his temples.

  “How does doing that feel?”

  He stopped, sitting straight up. “I can’t stand it. I’ve never been so depressed.

  I’m normally an ‘up’ kind of guy! This has never happened to me before.”

  “Before the real estate market went bad, how did you feel?” I asked.

  He sat back in his chair. “Oh, I felt great.”

  “Your happiness and self-worth seem to have gone up and down with the market,” I observed.

  “Well . . . I guess you could put it that way.”

  “Okay, let’s stay with that thought. You feel good about yourself when things are going well. So does that mean you’re only as worthwhile as your performance?”

  “Well, I don’t like looking at it that way.” He paused.

  “Is it true?”

  “Yeah, I guess,” he mumbled. “I mean, I know I feel a lot more worthwhile when things are going good.”

  Our culture has an obsession with performance. We want to know how many units a salesman sold, how many home runs a baseball player hit, how many As a student made, how many degrees an applicant has, and on and on. These are somehow the signs of being not just successful but worthwhile in our culture. Somehow we’ve gotten achievement mixed up with worth—if a salesman, for instance, sells a million widgets, he must be a great, worthwhile person. This attitude may be an inescapable part of competitive living in the modern world, but it has created a feeling in many of us that we have about as much personal worth as we can earn.

  You may remember the story of Kathy Ormsby. It was 1986 in Indianapolis, Indiana, the site of the NCAA track-and-field championships. Kathy was a premed honor student and track star at North Carolina State University. She also happened to be the collegiate record holder in the women’s ten-thousand-meter run. Something quite unexpected happened during the championship race. Kathy fell behind and couldn’t seem to catch the front-runner. In a startling move, she ran off the track and out of the stadium to a nearby bridge, where she jumped off. The forty-foot fall permanently paralyzed her from the waist down.

  Not knowing Kathy personally, I can only guess that the pressure she put on herself to be perfect coupled with a tendency to equate her worth with performance created a level of misery she couldn’t handle. Many of us who struggle with those two issues—having to be perfect and having personal worth dictated by achievement—reach a point of total despair, even suicide, when we experience failure.

  The “worth equals performance” lie is a tough one to crack. Many things around us reinforce it every day. Yet with some effort we can challenge and overcome it. Let’s get back to Ted and his struggle with this lie.

  “That sounds a little stupid, I know,” said Ted, shrugging, “the fact that I feel I am more worthwhile
when I’m doing well at work. But I put so much of myself into it. And when I was on top, everybody else told me how great I was. It’s just natural to value yourself more when things are going well.”

  “Maybe in that light the slowdown in the real estate market is a good thing for you,” I suggested.

  “Whoa,” he said, raising his hands. “Back up. How could that be?”

  “Well, it is giving you a chance to face the fact that you have based your worth on what you do—not who you are.”

  “Yeah, well, what worth do I have apart from what I do?” he asked in a low voice out of the side of his mouth.

  “That’s a good question, but I think you’ve got to answer that,” I said, and I waited.

  Ted stared at me a moment, shuffled his feet, then said, “I guess we need to keep talking then.”

  And we did. Ted grappled with the fact that he had spent his whole life equating his worth as a human being with how he did on the field of competition. Growing up as a kid, he allowed sports to determine his worth. In college, grades decided his worth. As an adult, the amount of money he made dictated the matter. Ted saw the destructiveness of living his life this way, and he made a concerted effort to separate how well he performed each day from his personal worth.

  The real estate market slowdown and his depression about it did prompt Ted to face a very important question: What is the basis of human worth? That’s the $64,000 question here, isn’t it? I believe that you can choose from three answers, two of which don’t work. Let me walk you through them.

  One way to answer the question, “What is the basis of human worth?” is to use Ted’s approach. You can try to earn worth through performance. You can compete with others and hope that you do well enough to earn the sense of worth you seek. But as we have already discussed, this approach leaves you with an unstable sense of worth that fluctuates with each performance you give. That roller coaster isn’t worth riding.

  A second approach to solving the worth issue is the humanistic approach. The idea is that we humans have worth because we exist and are the highest of all living things. We are living beings and the apex of everything that draws breath—that gives us worth. Yet the idea “I exist, therefore I have worth” seems a shallow way to solve the problem to me. Ants exist. Do they have the same worth I do? And the fact that I may be higher on the food chain than a monkey hits me as a basis for not having much of a sense of worth.

  The third option is to get theological. This approach says that one thing and one thing only gives human beings worth—we are made by God in His image. In other words, worth doesn’t come from the fact that you perform at a certain level, that you exist, or that you are higher than monkeys in the chain of being. It comes from being “fearfully and wonderfully made” by the Creator of the universe. To use a car analogy, worth doesn’t come from the fact that your engine is running, that you are faster or prettier than other cars, or that you function at a higher level than a bicycle. Worth comes from who made your car. Period.

  This vertical point of view provides at least two significant clarifications. First, it means that you have permanent worth. God never unmakes us in His image, so you always have worth. Second, it means that you have the same worth as everyone else, even if others outperform you. This truth ought to be comforting to those of us who are inexpensive little economy cars in a world that worships high-dollar luxury cars. The theological answer to the worth issue is the only true solution. Everything else falls short.

  Living this truth, though, is harder than believing it. How can we find a stable sense of worth in a world that focuses on what we do instead of who we are? Many of us have gone the route of Solomon, striving for achievement, power, success, material possessions, and sexual prowess in an effort to feel worthwhile. What we find, however, is usually the same feeling of futility that Solomon did.

  Earlier in this chapter, Ted posed a very important question: “Who am I apart from what I do?” Let me ask you that. Who are you apart from what you do? Do you have to “do” to have worth, or are you clear yet that you “are” a person of innate worth because of whose image you bear? We all need to make sure we have an answer to that question.

  “Life Should Be Easy.”

  Automatic dishwashers, microwave ovens, garage door openers, central air-conditioning. Let’s face it. Of all the people on earth, we Americans have the most gadgets designed to make our lives easier. The moment we have them, we all but decide we can’t live without them.

  Granted, there is probably nothing wrong with making life as difficulty free as possible. Finding ways to make our existence easier makes good sense. What causes trouble is that this attitude often shifts into one that demands that life, in all its complexity, be easy. We often give ourselves over to the pleasure principle—a basic tendency in each of us to minimize pain and maximize pleasure. This bent toward pleasure and away from pain, though, leads us to run from problems that need to be faced.

  Life is not easy, no matter how many gold cards and garage door openers and microwave ovens we have. The very first words of the best-selling book The Road Less Traveled are golden on this matter: “Life is difficult.”6That is one of life’s all-time great truths. But most of us can’t stand the fact that this happens to be true, so we keep looking for a life free from difficulty and bitterly resenting it when one doesn’t come.

  Remember Julie at the beginning of Chapter 2? She was convinced that life was easy for everyone but her. Why did she get the husband who left for another woman? Why did she have a son with a learning disorder? Why did she have to put her father in a nursing home? Why did her windshield get cracked? She was certain she was the only one in the world who had it tough. What was the result of her attitude? Bitterness. Resentment. Depression. I see these three emotions most often in my patients who live this lie.

  Life is not easy. Never has been, never will be. Whether we like it or not, the fact of the matter is that life is tough. The willingness to accept this, truly accept it, helps us to have a life free from bitterness and resentment. Julie was right about one thing. Some people do have it better than she does. But some people, many people, have it a whole lot worse. And all of us have crosses to bear.

  The other day, Julie came to a session smiling. She sat down with a plop and said, “Dr. Thurman, I had a wreck yesterday.”

  “Really?” I said. “Are you all right?”

  She said, “Oh, yes, I’m okay. It was a fender bender, but you know, the woman in the other car jumped out screaming, ‘Why does this always happen to me! I can’t take anymore of this!’ She went on and on, and as I stood there watching her . . .”

  “What went through your mind?”

  “I forgot all about my bent fender for a moment. All I could see was that woman. She was ‘me’ all over! I felt ashamed of myself.”

  “Really? Why?” I asked.

  “I realized that the woman really believed that somehow life singled her out for all the bad stuff, and I saw how bitter she was. I saw her emotionally come apart at the seams right in front of me, and it wasn’t pretty,” Julie admitted.

  “And you saw yourself in her?”

  “Yes, I realized that I have done that so many times, I can’t even count them. I guess I saw how childish and immature that is in people—to think that things should always go great and that when they don’t, it is unique to me. I don’t even like admitting it to you,” she confessed.

  “Julie, I appreciate your telling me all this. I know how painful it can be when you see something about yourself you don’t like. The wreck, I guess, turned out to have a silver lining in it for you, didn’t it?”

  “Yes, I guess so. It forced me to see what I think you have been trying to help me see all along. It sure is painful, though.”

  Julie began to experience less bitterness as she exchanged her “life should be easy” lie for the truth that life is difficult. She came to grips with the fact that while people’s difficulties may differ to some degree,
everyone has problems in one form or another. Thus, she saw that life is difficult for everybody and that she needed to move from whining about that to accepting it and facing whatever her problem was. She quit thinking she was uniquely singled out for a difficult life and came to understand that we are all in this together. Her anger, depression, and resentment subsided over the months that followed, and she began to experience greater calm in the face of life’s storms.

  “Life Should Be Fair.”

  “Hey, that’s not fair! Your piece is bigger than mine! Mom!”

  “Chris, share with your brother. Be fair.”

  Most of us were taught from day one about the importance of fairness. Parents, teachers, coaches, and clergy repeatedly told us to make sure that we acted as fairly as possible in dealing with other people. If one child gets three cookies, then the other one should get three as well. If one child gets to watch his favorite television program for half an hour, then the other child gets to do the same. If one child gets to go first this time, then the other child gets to go first the next time. Life should be fair. At least we are told that is the way it should be.

  I’m all for things being fair, but I wonder if a lot of us don’t come out of childhood and adolescence with a misguided belief that life will always be fair, which it most definitely is not. I’m only half joking when I say I wish my mom and dad had, on occasion, given my brothers and me unequal pieces of pie and said, “Hey, we love you guys all the same, but life isn’t fair sometimes, and we want you to learn to deal with that early on.”

  This “fair life” offshoot of the “easy life” lie is just as pervasive and just as destructive. It’s wishful thinking, and it’s damaging. Day-to-day reality provides frequent, painful reminders that life isn’t always going to be fair. A young man is killed by a drunk driver who walks away without a scratch. Drug dealers and pornography peddlers make millions and live in mansions. A less qualified applicant gets the job. The best runner is tripped from behind by another and loses the race. Our response is, “It isn’t fair,” as if labeling it that way somehow changes things. King Solomon, thousands of years ago, understood life’s unfairness when he noted that the wicked sometimes get what the righteous deserve and the righteous sometimes get what the wicked deserve.7