Six Minutes of Grace

Six Minutes

of

Grace

The Key to Finding

Happiness and Purpose

CAMERON D. CONWAY

SIX MINUTES OF GRACE

Copyright © 2019 by Cameron D. Conway

Cover design by Cameron D. Conway

Cover photo by Pixabay – pexels.com

All rights reserved. This book is protected by the copyright laws of Canada. This book may not be copied or reprinted for commercial gain or profit. The use of short quotations or occasional page coping for academic, personal or group study purposes is permitted and encouraged. Permission will be granted upon request.

CONWAY CHRISTIAN RESOURCES INC.

P.O. Box 71204, New Orleans PO,

Delta, British Columbia, Canada, V4C 8E7

https://conwaychristianresources.com

Discover Your Purpose, Build the Kingdom, Support the Next Generation.

ISBN-13 (paperback): 978-1-7753690-9-7

ISBN-13 (eBook): 978-1-989520-00-0

Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

To Christine, my loving, wise, and ever supportive wife,

and to Winnie the Poovier, my faithful yet ineffective supervisor

Contents

Introduction

Part 1: The Trap of Happiness

1. Can I Truly Be Happy?

2. Doers, Dreamers, and the Great Lie

3. Can Happiness Be Found Within?

Part 2: Reconnecting to the Source of Joy

4. All It Takes Is Six Minutes

5. Experiencing God’s Grace

6. The Gift of Gratitude

7. The Power of Reflection

8. The Need for Adoration

9. The Joy of Confession

10. The Freedom of Expression

Part 3: A Relationship That Changes Everything

11. One Minute Left

12. Redefining Our Way

Introduction

My work is my god, my wife said with a sigh from across the kitchen table. Steam curled up from her cup, and the smell of freshly brewed coffee hung in the air. I can’t live like this anymore. These were the kind of words that make the world screech to a halt. My stomach knotted up instantly. I knew that from this point forward, everything would have to change.

Before, we had blindly chased the dream of being self-made by working long hours, studying nonstop to find a competitive edge, and trusting that these things would bring us security and joy. But it was all a lie—the Great Lie told to every child born into this world of madness. A lie we served to fuel the system of commercialism, debt, security, and self-idolatry without realizing its great cost.

We’re both Christians, and I’d been in and around ministry for eighteen years. But where was God in this lifestyle we built? God had been reduced to a footnote as the demands of our lives intensified. In response to all of life’s obligations, we tried to figure things out ourselves on our quest for money, security, and living with good intentions. But sometimes life has a way of reminding us that we’re not really in control.

It had been a hard year, filled with the kind of trials that make you rethink the choices you’ve made. In the summer of 2018, my father-in-law had a heart attack. A second heart attack followed in the fall, then a stroke that put my wife on a plane to be with her family for a month. While his life hung in the balance, she sat by his side in the hospital, and God’s revealed His grace to her. When she got back home, our priorities changed, and our lives shifted forever in the light of this new revelation.

Sometimes the greatest clarity can be found in moments of tragedy. Sometimes you need life to stop moving at breakneck speed to see that you’ve been running on a treadmill, trading the very days of your life for things that have no eternal consequence.

When your work is your god, all other areas suffer. Your family, friends, and leisure are all sacrificed on the altar of tomorrow. We tell ourselves that it’ll be worth it afterward. But that promised tomorrow never comes. We’re left with lives marked by few meaningful results.

It needs to stop now, while there’s still time.

What are you creating with your life? What’s really important to you? If you can’t escape the feeling that you’ve been made for something more, then this book is for you.

Our lives changed when my wife and I realized we needed to intentionally put God first, even if just for six minutes at a time. We didn’t escape to a monastery. Neither of us quit our jobs. And yet everything has been rearranged. In that moment of change, we began to see how serving our god of happiness was robbing us from following after the real God who loved us and longed for us to draw closer to Him.

The veil that obscured our vision was lifted, and we saw something beyond what we were searching for. We also saw the truth behind what we had actually been chasing after. We saw the heart of the Doer and the Dreamer within us, and how the happiness we sought was only an echo of what was available for us.

Priority and intention are all you need to make a revolutionary change in your life. Our days are our lives; one builds on the next, and as they accumulate our story is told. Thank God that every day is a new opportunity, a fresh start and a blank page. Another day to make a choice to aim our lives toward God and away from the Great Lie.

Now therefore fear the LORD and serve him in sincerity and in faithfulness. Put away the gods that your fathers served beyond the River and in Egypt, and serve the LORD. And if it is evil in your eyes to serve the LORD, choose this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your fathers served in the region beyond the River, or the gods of the Amorites in whose land you dwell. But as for me and my house, we will serve the LORD. (Joshua 24:14 15)

PART 1

THE TRAP OF

HAPPINESS

1

Can I Truly Be Happy?

From a young age, we’re led to believe that success will make us happy. Success will bring us a spouse, money, comfort, a home, stuff to fill that home, and the ability to take nice vacations. How often as a child did we see the phrase happily ever after flash across the screen?

The poor orphan goes on an adventure and becomes the king or queen of the land, or becomes a great hero in battle. It’s the idea that if we just sit around and go about our mundane lives, eventually adventure and rewards will come knocking at our door. Only then can we truly be happy, for just beyond where we are is the place of bliss, contentment, and ease.

This idea, which has been embraced by so many people, gets reinforced as we’re indoctrinated to focus on the externals of life. Yet we tend to forget that these external things aren’t always within our control.

We think the reason we’re unhappy is that we don’t have the things we want—the perfect job, the ideal spouse, or more money in the bank. Regardless of what our white whale might be, we find ourselves thinking, If only I had ________, my life would be better. We idealize the perfect life and attribute our own unhappiness to our failure to possess it.

For some, it’s the white picket fence and the nuclear family. For others, it’s a mansion filled with staff to cook and clean for them. There are those who long to live in the forest, by a lake, or up on a mountain. Each person has an ideal of what their perfect happy life would look like, and they engineer their life to reach those dreams.

I watched my wife buy into these ideals as she followed the script of working hard to achieve the things that all earthly standards testify to as success. I marveled as she became a partner in a successful business with a contract to buy it out completely.

I had married my best friend from high school, who was (and still is) a loving, kind, and attentive spouse. Through our combined efforts, we became financially secure at a young age, thanks to our diligence and many sacrifices. We also regularly attended our church as card-carrying members. I was a member of the church financial council and coauthored the church’s weekly home group curriculum. Later I founded Conway Christian Resources and published my first book, Understanding Who You Are: A Survey of 21st Century Beliefs.

From the outside, life looked great, but deep inside something was missing. Success didn’t equal satisfaction. We found what many others have discovered: that the hard work put in to achieve our dream rewarded us with only more hard work. There wasn’t much more happiness in our lives, but only more responsibility and less time to do the things that actually made us happy.

When Succeeding Isn’t Success

The success we’re taught from a young age to strive toward is something external. And being external, it’s only temporary. That new car will rust out, fall apart, and end up one day in a wrecking yard. That new job title will eventually go to someone else, if the company even survives that long. That nest egg will eventually get spent, and the gains erode as they’re taxed into oblivion.

All these things we work toward either degrade, disappear, or become valueless. But at the same time, all these things tell us (and those around us) that we’re successful, that we’ve achieved and arrived at a higher and better level of existence.

How will I know if I’ve succeeded if I can’t have things others are unable to possess? How will people around me know that I’m superior and successful unless they can recognize it half a mile away?

It’s the idea that the person with the most stuff wins, so by definition shouldn’t that person be the happiest of them all? In reality, those with the most stuff can be the most miserable, because they constantly fear losing all they have. They’re unable to enjoy it and be happy, because around every corner is someone looking to become happy at their expense by taking what they have.

On the other hand, there are those who feel that they haven’t succeeded, and they spend their time grumbling and complaining that the grass isn’t as green for them as it is for others. They look at the lush, well-manicured lawns of the successful and believe the lie that they’d be happier if their lawn looked like that. Once again, it’s the externals that are used to tell us and others if we’re happy or not.

The greener the grass, the happier the life is the idea accepted by many, but at no point do they question why the grass is greener. Maybe it’s because the successful person hires someone to make it like that, because they’re so busy they could never do it on their own. Or it could be that the other person actually put in the time and effort to make it look that way. Those who grumble and complain about their grass tend to be those who are unwilling to put in the work to make it better.

I remember when I moved into a house with three lilac bushes on the property. They were in rough shape and hadn’t produced flowers for several years. I had three choices. I could leave them as they were and hope for the best, I could cut them down, or I could put in some effort and fix them. It took two years of pruning, fertilizing, watering, and managing, but finally those bushes sprouted their lilacs for the first time in years.

Did this bring a sense of accomplishment? Yes. Did it make the yard look better? Yes. Did it make me happy? No. I was glad that my effort brought about a good result, but it didn’t change how I felt on the inside. To top it off, the summer that the lilacs finally bloomed was also the same summer that we moved across the country. After all the hours of work I put in, the benefits were to be enjoyed by another family.

There has to be more to life than houses, cars, and landscaping, but if these aren’t the keys to happiness, what is? Since trying to solve the matters of happiness with the external wasn’t the answer, my wife looked inwardly. She turned to self-help books, having been reading them since she was a teenager.

It wasn’t because something was wrong, but in response to her aching for more. There was something missing, and yet the books couldn’t create inner peace or transform their information into joy. Any fix was only temporary relief, a distraction from the emptiness and the gnawing feeling that in the midst of a fairy tale existence, something was still missing.

Inside, there’s a cry—and not only in myself, because I’ve heard that cry everywhere: I know I was made for more. It’s the feeling of unfulfilled purpose. It weighs on my heart and leaves me unsatisfied. Stuff doesn’t satisfy it, information doesn’t satisfy it. Neither do titles, success, or the praises of others.

The Vanity of Vanity

What can you do when you’ve done everything right and found it lacking? This is what we and many other people have found out about life. Even Solomon dedicated the book of Ecclesiastes to this idea. The things we can buy at a store cannot make us happy over the long-term. We see that everything either fades away or forces us to pursue something else.

This is what’s referred to as vanity, where we have a high view of something or ourselves, but in the end it’s useless. It’s like dressing up a salmon in a top hat and a coat while calling it Lord Sebastian the Salmon, Ruler of All in the River. It doesn’t matter; you wasted your money, and no matter how that salmon was dressed up, it still ends up in an