Motivation.  It’s hard to come by and even harder to share.  There are a few of us, among millions, who are great motivators.  The rest of us are left shaking our heads, either at our inability to motivate ourselves or someone else.  

Looking back over my years as a parent, I realize that there is very little we can do to motivate someone who doesn’t want to be motivated.  I learned the hard way that neither rewards nor punishment will motivate a “strong-willed” individual.  Unfortunately, there is not a weak-willed individual to be found in our home!

So if we can’t motivate others, how on earth are we going to motivate ourselves?  I often think of my Mom saying “we all have to do things we don’t want to,” and I have repeated this many times to my children.  Now they repeat it back to me.  (You know what they say about payback.)  But I’m not so sure anymore about the validity of that statement.  There are those around us who seldom, if ever, do anything they don’t want to.  How does that work?

Moms do not have that option.  We perpetually straighten up rooms that we didn’t tear apart, clean up disgusting messes we didn’t make, and do load after load of laundry that doesn’t belong to us — and that’s only when our children are toddlers!  It’s not that we resent these chores (or maybe, sometimes, we do), but it’s more that we look around and wonder why.  Why is it me cleaning the kitty litter for two cats I didn’t even want?  Answer:  So they don’t pee on the pile of clean clothes in the laundry basket and make more work for yeah, you guessed it — me!

But back to my original question:  Where does the “want to” come from?  The desire to rise to the challenge and see something through to completion.  I’ve asked myself that many times, especially lately.  And finally, in a book titled “Made to Crave,” I’ve found an answer:  It comes from God.

The premise of the book is very simple:  We are made to crave…something.  And that craving can only be met by God.  Oh, we’ll try to stuff all sorts of things inside that “God-shaped space,” but none of them will satisfy.  Not food, not shopping, not alcohol…nothing. Another author, Beth Moore, put it succinctly:  “All excess is rooted in emptiness.”

I’ve read Lysa TerKeurst’s book, “Made to Crave”, cover to cover.  It is heavily highlighted and completely dead on.  Why then, has it not changed me or my attitudes or my actions?  It is in re-reading it that I have found the little nugget that holds the key to my motivation:  “Shallow desires produce only shallow results.  I had to seek a spiritual ‘want to’ empowered by God Himself.”

Yep, my desires are shallow — to be thin again.  To wear all the smaller clothes in my closet.  To not feel self-conscious when I walk out the front door.  All shallow.  None of them enough to give me the “want to” to tackle the problem.  I have all the tools I need, I just need the motivation.  “Getting healthy isn’t just about losing weight.  It’s not limited to adjusting our diet and hoping for good physical results.  It’s about recalibrating our souls so that we WANT to change — spiritually, physically, and mentally.”  (Emphasis mine.)

So, here I stand at a precipice, ready to jump or not.  How badly do I want this?  Enough to cry out to God every day?  Every moment?  God can give me the strength — just enough with Him on my side — so I “want to” make healthy choices.  But as always, it’s up to me…