Mess of Ulterior Motives
It is a frightening thing when you really study the motives for your actions. Actions are affected by emotions or desires, our emotional response to things depends on our character and value system as does what we desire. Obviously this is much simplified but the fact remains that the true impetus for your emotions is hard to find but when you do it is almost always an ugly sight.
Many people through history have pontificated that “there is no such thing as an unselfish act” and upon inspection of myself I can only agree. Even the people I love I do so expecting something back from them in return; a feeling triggered by a smile or a kind word. So deeply runs this unspoken expectation that even when faced with being ignored completely accidentally, we are prone to respond with feelings of anger, self-doubt or many other emotions depending on our character, which in turn could result in one of billions of actions we’d rather not have ever done (including bottling up those emotions).
The truth is that we love everyone with a hook. Human love is a spoilt, impure, self-ridden, form of manipulation. We are a mess of ulterior motives and what’s worse is that we’ve managed to convince ourselves that we’re ok. That when we’ve found a symbiotic situation with someone where we both love each other in a mutually manipulative way that somehow we’re better than the guy who beats his wife. No. It’s simply that that mans character has been shaped by different circumstances. It’s most likely he watched his father beat his mother, promising himself he’d never do that but finding himself in that place anyway. Our inbuilt placing of ourselves before others is a universal trait of humanity, however it manifests itself.
I suppose some people would say ‘What about people who die for others? What possible selfish gain is there for them?’. To that end I would quote Jesus in John 15v13 – “Greater love has no man than this, that he would lay down his life for his friends.” Jesus understood the principal and eventually put it into practice. So there is hope. Human beings are capable of loving properly. All the stories of heroes who make it into legend involve self-sacrifice. Something about it captures the aspirations and the respect of the human soul. The question is…can I learn to sacrifice my desires for people who I haven’t even met before. Jesus did. I haven’t even managed to do it for my friends. Thankfully God loves me in such a way that he is willing to forgive me for no gain of his own. He asks nothing back off me, but is aching for me to follow him. To allow him to teach me His ways. Is there such thing as a selfless act? I’m betting my life on it.
Agree/disagree? Think I’m nuts? Let me know.
Teach Me Your Ways
I’ve recently come back from Oxford. A bit of a change from sunny Walsall, and although I enjoyed it there, surprisingly, I’m quite glad to be back. Walsall’s gritty reality, where people couldn’t care less about their nicotine stained teeth, makes a refreshing change from Oxfords thin veneer of contentedness and unending cycle of keeping up with the Jones’.
I was attending Kings Bible College and Training Centre, which was truly awesome. I guess I’m only mentioning this because it forms such a huge part of my life experience. A lot of the things that I’ve learned about my God and the bible have become the lens through which I view life, more than ever before, so I’ll probably be mentioning it a lot. In some respects it is only a one year theology course but then it’s so much more. Because of the small amount of people on the course you become extraordinarily close friends with them. I feel like many of those people are closer than family to me now. Every day, God turns up and speaks to people and heals people both physically and emotionally. You, and the people you live with over that year, change, literally from week to week, as God forms their lives and uses the people around them to do it; what a privilege! For me, God has used the year to reveal much about my character, my flaws and my attributes, which has been a bittersweet process that I wouldn’t change for the world. All through the year the phrase that kept repeating itself within my heart was “Teach me your ways, so that I may walk in your truth”. It’s a phrase that is repeated often in the Psalms (Psalm 25, 27 and 84 to mention but a few) and it just kept jumping out of the page at me time and again resounding in my mind. 
It’s clear that God was speaking it into my life and it’s become the liturgy for my life. I know I’ll still be praying it on the day that I die.
KBC uncovered an emotional and artistic side to me that I hadn’t properly recognised before. I hope some of the product of that will end up here as I work through some of the thoughts and revelations that have formed me over the last amazing year.
The photo was taken and edited by me near the beggining of the year. The quote is from Psalm 84v11 but the composition allows the verse to be read as your mind sees fit. It hung on my wall and became a photograph that explained just how i felt, praying that verse and really meaning it. Knowing that God was answering every day. Straightforward but absolutely uncertain. Beautiful but dangerous.
Ps. All the photo's that appear on this blog are available as high quality prints in a variety of sizes. Just drop me an e-mail and i'll send you the details.
Porta-loo Explosion
I guess I had better let people know a little bit about me (see my personal profile), so I’m going to start by sharing a little about my home. I have lived all my life in a large and filthy town called Walsall, which is found just outside Birmingham, right in the heart of the black country, also affectionately* known as the arm-pit of Britain. It is famous for being boring, smelly and being run by morons.
* not actually true. I mean affectionately in the same way that people ‘affectionately’ refer to their extended family as ‘eccentric’. What they really saying is that they’re appalled at being even distantly related to them.
For instance, the council, upon being informed by disgruntled elderly residents that their town centre smelled like an open sewer, decided to do something about it. (I say elderly because the younger population having had any vestiges of pride in their home-town leached away long ago, really couldn’t care less). Anyway, someone in the offices managed to have an idea; they bought thousands of lavender plants and put them in the town centre. Obviously this was treating the symptom rather than the problem, a bit like buying a double cheeseburger to solve a bulimics weight problem. It’s difficult to understand the response. You could compare it to having a particularly offensive turd on the rug in your living room and leaving it there for a few weeks to be trodden into the pile before declaring that it’s about time to buy an air-freshener. What you inevitably end up with is an unholy mixture; a doubly sickening floral-faeces stench that could choke a maggot, like a porta-loo explosion at a flower festival. Obviously this is just one of many misdemeanours of the Walsall Metropolitan Borough Council, many of which can be read about at the delightfully sarcastic Walsall Wonderland website. Read all about the local tramps and Walsall’s appalling history when it comes to commissioning works of public art.
On a more serious note Walsall has the highest teenage pregnancy rates in Europe and is one of the worst performing boroughs in the area of education. So, why do I want to live here again? Well the place isn’t important, you can tell that from what I’ve written. It’s because of the people. They are important.
If I believe that Jesus lived and died for people and I claim to follow him, then there are only two types of people living in Walsall; my friends, whom I love and everyone else, who I will spend the rest of my life learning to love. The only question remaining is a big one: What exactly does that look like?
Let me give you a clue…it doesn’t involve me dressing up in orange robes, dancing through the town centre whilst brandishing a tambourine, picking the aforementioned lavender and searching for ‘inner peace’. I’m learning that it’s all about finding a need - and filling it.
More on this later.
Welcome!
Hello there, and welcome to my blog. My name is Matt Heaton, i've never done this before and i'm not entirely sure why i'm doing it now. Only time will tell what this corner of the net will end up looking like. I hope it will end up looking like me, and maybe just a little bit like Jesus. My hero and my best friend. Find out how, why, what, where and when...or at least join me in discussing all the above. Come in and feel at home, you're not intruding.
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