Life! Celebrate It: Listen, Learn, Laugh, Love

Life!

Celebrate It

Life!

Celebrate It

luci swindoll

LIFE! CELEBRATE IT

©2006 Luci Swindoll.

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotation in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher.

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All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from The New King James Version, © 1984 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Other Scripture quotations are taken from the following: The King James Version of the Bible (KJV). Public domain. The Message by Eugene H. Peterson (MSG), copyright © 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 2000, 2001, 2002. Used by permission of NavPress Publishing Group. All rights reserved. The Holy Bible, New International Version © (NIV ® ). Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved. The Living Bible (TLB). Copyright © 1971 by Tyndale House Publishers, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Cover design: Studio Olika, Cincinnati, Ohio

       Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Swindoll, Luci, 1932–

   Life: celebrate it! / Luci Swindoll.

      p. cm.

   Summary: Answers to questions about balancing life and a quality life that is very full—Provided by publisher.

   Includes bibliographical references.

   ISBN 0-8499-0051-4 (hardcover)

   1. Christian life. I. Title.

BV4501.3.S96 2006

248.4—dc22             2005033073

Printed in the United States of America

06 07 08 09 10 QW 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This book is affectionately dedicated with appreciation

to my wonderful friends:

SANDY LOUGH

AND

RUTH CRONIN-FRUITT

Together we have celebrated life to the fullest for thirty years,

listening, learning, laughing, and loving.

What joy they have brought to my heart!

Contents

Foreword by Mary Graham

Backward

Part 1: Listen

1. Listen with Your Head

2. Listen with Your Heart

3. Listen Without Being Critical

4. Listen When You’re Hurt

Part 2: Learn

5. Learn What to Save

6. Learn What to Spend

7. Learn Where to Start

8. Learn When to Stop

Part 3: Laugh

9. Laugh with Life

10. Laugh with Others

11. Laugh with Yourself

12. Laugh with God

Part 4: Love

13. Love What You’re Doing

14. Love Though It’s Painful

15. Love: How It Works

16. Love Who You Are

Forward

Notes

Foreword

Luci Swindoll has been my friend and almost constant companion on the road for many years. I’ve traveled literally all over the world with her—she’s searched for adventure and I for a nice rest. (How we’ve managed to find both without driving one another crazy is another story.)

I’m actually a good traveler with a lot of experience. I learned to travel in my years with Campus Crusade for Christ, and by the time I met Luci in the late seventies, I knew how to get almost anywhere in the world without fear or intimidation, with no second language, and very little money. I often scared my parents but never myself. I knew how to travel long before I met Luci.

What I didn’t know, frankly, was how to live. I went everywhere, but sights and sounds flew by me without my even paying attention. When Luci and I started traveling here and there together, I could get us anywhere in the world on a shoestring. But when we arrived? That’s when Luci took over.

You see, Luci knows not only how to live but how to live well. She knows how to savor life and celebrate it. She knows how to make the most of every second and live the life out of it. She knows how to listen, learn, laugh, and love. She simply knows how to live.

That’s why, in thirty years’ of friendship with her, I’ve begged her to sit with almost everyone I’ve ever known and talk with them about life. I ask her questions, and her answers stimulate life-changing conversations.

Is it any surprise that I now have about three million new friends through my work with Women of Faith? And I want Luci to tell them all about life and how to squeeze it for all it’s worth! That’s what this book does. I recommend your reading it and then passing it on to your closest three million friends.

Mary Graham

President, Women of Faith

Backward

A few months ago, I saw something that intrigued me. It was a cabin cruiser in the harbor with My First Boat printed across the stern. There’s nothing very intriguing about that, you may say . . . but the way those words read caught my attention. Each one was printed upside down. The very smug-looking owner (admiring his work from the deck) had just finished painting the last letter. Of course, leaning over the water and looking down, he could read everything perfectly.

I laughed out loud, thinking, How clever! I don’t know if he did it just for fun or if he really thought we could see it right side up. But either way, I loved it because it made me reflect on how often my own boat has felt upside down.

Driving along that day, I thought about my first boat— the skiff that took me to the shore of my dreams and dropped me off as an inexperienced ingenue in the days before I knew better or had a reliable map to guide me. With nothing more than a college degree and heart full of anticipation, I was floating along as a complete greenhorn, trying to get sea legs.

In our youth, we think we can do anything and go anywhere. We head out to conquer new territory across the vast ocean of life, full of excitement, ambition, imagination, and ignorance. At least, that was my thinking. With the encouragement of my parents and my own personal aspirations, I hoped to find the sunken chest of life’s treasures.

In my twenties, I thought I knew everything there was to know about life. I fantasized circumstances where others would engage me in fascinating, enriching conversation including questions about life and how to solve its problems. I pictured open forums where I’d be seated before an audience of my peers, hands up all over the place wanting me to clear away the fog of their quandaries. Yeah, right.

Funny thing was, nobody asked me anything when I was young. Nobody cared what I thought. Nobody wanted problems solved by someone who barely knew how to raise a sail. It’s hard on our ego to face the fact we know very little and our paper-thin values do nothing but flap in the breeze. But that’s the way it was. And it’s even harder to realize we don’t learn life’s most important lessons until our boat has completely capsized and we’ve been forced to swim fast or tread water in an angry ocean.

And you want to know what’s even more disconcerting? Now that I’m in my seventies, with gray hair and brittle bones, people ask me questions all the time about how I’ve learned to stay afloat. They want to know the secret of being a happy single woman, how I survived in the corporate world, when I planned my career, and where I learned to balance time, energy, and money. They wonder what’s helped me the most as a Christian or how I experience the fullness of life. They ask about process, development, purpose, wisdom, passion, and lessons learned. All sorts of questions. Of course, they’re looking for answers to their own dilemmas, just as I did when I was their age.

But I don’t want to tell people how to solve their problems. I don’t know enough. When I’m ninety, I still won’t know enough! All I can do is take out my very marked-up map and point them in the direction of probabilities that lead to some degree of understanding and acceptance of themselves.

So that’s what this book is about. It’s a backward glance over seven decades of trying to figure things out so my little boat won’t turn over. I’ve divided this book into four parts, which correlate to the four phases of life through which we all progress—listening, learning, laughing, and loving.

In my younger years, I wish I had spent less time waiting for someone to ask me for answers and more time being willing to listen to those who had lived long enough to actually know some of the answers. If I had listened more, then I surely would have learned more—about life, about others, and about myself. And as I learned from others by really listening to them, then I would have been able to laugh more, because let’s face it: funny stuff happens in life. Although I didn’t listen or learn nearly enough in my younger years, I did learn to laugh. And as I stepped back to laugh at life and myself and situations, I was finally able to fully and freely love—to love God, to love who He created me to be, and to love all the people God has sent to enrich my life.

If God gives you a long life, one day you’ll be my age (or perhaps you are now). You’ll then take time to look backward too. Your brain will simply ponder the past whether you want it to or not.

You’ll have regrets and disappointments. You’ll remembers sorrows you bore and temptations you failed to overcome. You’ll smile when you consider joyful adventures and risks that catapulted you into achievement. You might even find tears welling up because of a loved one lost along the way or a dream that never materialized. You’ll feel grateful for the fact God never let you down and for His severe mercy that taught you lessons you could have never learned unless your heart was broken.

All of that is life.

Several years ago, a dear friend gave me a thin, colorful little book called The Atlas of Experience.¹ It’s based on the theory that human beings have always been haunted by fundamental questions and searching for answers. This book opens before the reader a sea of possibilities on which we all travel. By means of its evocative maps and routes, one can follow many passageways that lead to shorelines where our imagination, ideas, feelings, experience, and faith are enlarged. Questions may not be answered to our satisfaction, but we’re made to think.

That’s the way life works. It’s uncertain and has myriad ups and downs. If we cannot or do not learn from these uncertainties, we’ll repeat patterns that keep us treading water. And if we get stuck there, how will we find our sea legs? How will we become adults?

As long as we are in the human condition, we’ll have questions. You can count on it! A few of our questions will be simple and have easy answers. Others will be difficult, taking time to work out. Some will demand processing with counselors, friends, and God before an answer will come. And some of our questions will never be solved this side of heaven. We are not meant to know what to do. We simply have to trust the One who is the keeper of our hearts.

Don’t be afraid of life! God has given it to us to be celebrated fully.

There is a tide in the affairs of men,

Which, taken at the flood leads on to fortune;

Omitted, all the voyage of their life

Is bound in shallows and in miseries.

On such a full sea are we now afloat,

And we must take the current when it serves

Or lose our ventures.

—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Julius Caesar

part one

1 Listen With Your Head

There are two types of listening—listening with your head and listening with your heart. While I realize that people often listen and make decisions with both heart and head, in many ways it’s impossible to separate them. I want to discuss them separately, however, because I so strongly feel unless we learn how to separate the two, we won’t be able to make some decisions at all. Our evaluations will be too muddled.

When I was younger, that was often my dilemma. I simply couldn’t decide between what my heart felt and what my mind thought, so I did nothing. I know a lot of people like that now. They operate out of involuntary inertia, unable to differentiate between knowledge and feelings. When we live between those two poles, it’s very hard to make sound decisions.

But the truth is, I