Midweek Faith Lift
March 26, 2025
Willingness v Willfulness- Who Wins?
Rev. Deb Hill-Davis
Spiritual Passages
March 17, 2025
During the American Civil war, President Lincoln had a strapping athletic young man as his secretary. In those days before office machinery, such a man would literally be pushing a pen or pencil. This particular man was not happy about it. He wanted to get out where the action was on the battlefield. He wanted to go and do great things for his country. He was quite willing to die if necessary. So he kept on complaining about the work he was doing, when he could be in uniform confronting the enemy. After hearing the usual complaint one day, Lincoln stared at him, rubbed his hands in his beard and said in his philosophical way, “Young man as I see it, you are quite willing to die for your country, but you are not willing to live for it.”
We change not by mustering up willpower but by changing the way we think, which will also involve changing our actions and our social environment. We change indirectly. We do what we can.
~ James Bryan Smith, "The Good and Beautiful God"
Affirmative Prayer for today: Spirit of God, I am open and receptive to your will for me as I call upon the spiritual power of will to shift in consciousness from willfulness to willingness. Show the way, God, show the way. Amen
We have been traveling the path of investigation of the spiritual Power of Will, which involves choice, commitment and today the idea of willingness. Last week, we looked at commitment as the sustaining power of will and now we consider willingness, which is the energy or fuel that makes commitment possible. If willingness is going to serve us in sustaining commitment, then we have to be clear about whether we are willing or willful, and that is not easy to discern, often it is painful and requires surrender, which is simple but not easy.
In our human expression of will power, we hold strong convictions of how things should be and how things should work out in our lives and in the lives of other and in our world. We have a lot of attachments to our unwritten, but unenforceable rules for how others should behave. When they don’t, well, it becomes a ditch we are willing to die in rather than a hill to climb and live for, right? In a word, we have strong attachments to our will and the energy of control because we know best, right? That is the ultimate energy of willfulness….the need to be right, right? But would you rather be right or be happy? Pause, breathe, and breathe again….that is a good question, one worth pondering.
Bottom line is that letting go of control, or becoming willing is a kind of surrender that is freeing even as it is terrifying. I love the quote from James Bryan Smith, “We change not by mustering up will power……we change indirectly, we do what we can.” Ahh… this is a process and I do what I can. The first step of letting go of control is to recognize that we are in fact trying to control how we should be, how things should be, even little things. He didn’t fold the towels right, she didn’t put the utensils back in the right place, that’s not how you mow the grass, make the bed, pack the car for a trip…and on and on and on. You get the idea! Can I let go of some of that….hmmmm, yes.
The observation Abe Lincoln shares with the young man who is itching to die for his country but not willing to live for it is a profound question for all of us. What are we willing to live for? To live from a place of willingness asks a lot of us, for sure. It asks us to pause and breathe and make space in our awareness, in our consciousness for the bigger picture and the reality that we don’t see the whole picture. We may not be right about that! There is always more to the story and sometimes we only learn that by our willingness to surrender.
Remember from our discussion about choice and will, we learned that what we really need to do is to free our will so that we can freely make responsive choices rather than reactive ones. Now we are learning the hard lesson of surrender, of becoming willing and it is a doozie. When I am willful, “I know what I want and I know how to get it!” and I am by God going to get it! I defend my focused attention…but at what cost? When I am so intent, nothing can get through to my conscious awareness. I am intense, not intentional, so I am not open to the flow of Divine Ideas that are always flowing and always available.
There is no flow because my willfulness is ungovernable by wisdom just as I am attached to my stubbornness. Charles Fillmore cautioned,” Stubborn, willful, resistant states of mind congest the life flow.” (Twelve Powers of Man, p.48) It can even impede the body’s digestion, elimination and circulation serving as a contributing factor in illness and disease. The antidote to this poison is to cultivate willingness, a mindset of allowing what is there to be there and to connect with our higher energy of Spiritual will to bring us to a higher state of awareness.
So what about surrender as part of this process? From "The Art of Being" by Dennis Merrit Jones, we read:
Many people shut down the minute they hear the word surrender. The word can drudge up some sort of pain or fear from a precious experience, which is often based on a concern of losing control or giving their power to another person. Surrender is about giving up control but not to another person or any situation. The spirit within has no need to garner our personal power because it is already all powerful as well as all knowing. With this in mind, rather than praying in utter desperation, “God, show me the way out (of this mess),” we might actually pray, “God show me the way in (to a deeper communion with source),” trusting that from that deeper place of knowing, we are always gently led to where we need to be. This then is divine surrender.
This beautifully describes the process of spiritual growth that calls us to lean in to what we are resisting whereby we allow it to teach us whatever our next growth edge is offering us. It is a journey of faith, to trust in that higher perspective of Spirit that offers us a place of learning, growth, of not knowing and the capacity to live in peace with what is.
Rev. Linda describes willingness this way on p.71 of Divine Audacity. She writes:
Willingness is a state of allowing. Allowing is our capacity to welcome our experience and receive its gifts. Allowing is our ability to cooperate with the flow of divine ideas.
In this life, with all our life experiences, it may take a moment to come to a place of allowing because we are, after all, human. We have many experiences, which are not especially welcome, which we would rather just avoid or refuse. When that is not possible, we rant and rave, call ten friends and complain, express our outrage and finally, in exhaustion, we surrender. However, this is not a giving up, it is a giving in to the full reality of the experience. It is a kind of surrender that is described as “going over to the winning side.” How is that?
Well, as several of you may know, on March 10, there was an article in the Register all about my ex-husband’s journey to become the first Iowan to marry as a result of the changes to the laws in Thailand allowing gay marriage. This was the Monday after our big sale, and I had planned to give myself a relaxing morning, free of stress etc. I can hear you all thinking, then why was Rev. Deb reading the paper at all? Well, I skipped the front page to the Metro section and there was the article, picture and all. Wow! I had been told it was going to happen, but not when. And then I read it and my peaceful morning was now hijacked by emotions I thought were long gone. It was full of inaccuracies, which was concerning but not surprising.
Most distressing was that my name was in it along with both our children and no one had asked permission to include our names I later found out. I had to lean into my human experience and feelings, which were not at all pleasant or relaxing. At 10:00 AM, I had our regularly scheduled prayer time with my prayer partner who was able to listen and hold my many feelings. She is an angel! She asked me to consider how long I actually wanted to give my energy and attention to this and what was I willing to do with it? Great questions!
I took some time to process my feelings, talked with other trusted friends and realized my upset was more with the reporter and his failure to contact me for my side of the story. As I sat in prayer, connecting with that power of Divine will, I gained clarity about what was mine to do and I calmed down. I emailed the reporter and we have since had a conversation. He apologized for not exercising due diligence in his research for the article and indicated that it was a huge lesson for him. He did not intend to cause difficulty for me and felt really badly about it. It was our willingness to lean into the lessons of this challenging passage that brought us both up higher, to a place of human and spiritual growth. May it be so….
Blessings on the Path,
Rev. Deb