A JesusHack (from the term “life hack”) helps you live like Jesus and cultivate intentional, holistic faith in a changing world.
As I reflect on this endeavor to live like Jesus in everything I do, I can’t help but think about how much I needed these tips when I was first entering my twenties.
Our twenties can be an intense time of transition for many of us. We can either be overwhelmed by all of our transitions, forcing our faith to be practically non-existent, or we can allow our confusion and hardships to push us deeper into our faith.
I chose the latter.
By trying to live like Jesus in every sphere of my life, I learned that faith doesn’t have to be squashed in my twenties. It can flourish and seep into everything I do, informing my work, relationships, and daily tasks.
I’m thankful I have Jesus as a guiding compass for my twenties. If you want Jesus to inform your twenties as well, but you don’t know where to begin, here are a few JesusHacks to help you get started:
1. Love those in front of you.
Jesus entered each new town wondering how He could love the people in the immediate community. In short, He prioritized time with the people in front of Him. Today, we have social media. We can reach out to people we don’t know across the world and also be with people in real life. But sometimes, we get our priorities mixed up. We can spend more time with people on Facebook than we can with the people right in front of us. As a result, we can feel lonely, and water down the relationships around us, the relationships God called us to nurture.
While you’re on Facebook, don’t forget the people God has placed around you as well. It’ll make for more meaning and fulfillment from your relationships.
2. Make forgiveness a reflex.
We tend to think we need forgiveness only for deep, hurtful situations like betrayal or abuse. But really, we need forgiveness for every day life, for surface-level situations as well. For instance, if someone cuts you off on the road, you need to be quick to forgive that person instead of judge them. We need a special kind of reflex-forgiveness, the kind that we can practice for petty, surface-level situations. Once we can master that, we can move onto deeper reconciliation.
3. Fail publicly.
I hate admitting my failures. Instead, I turn my failures into taboo topics. But when I do this, I live in my failure. I repeat it to myself without moving on to correct the problem. Instead, it surfaces in an ugly and mean way.
As twentysomethings who are still learning, we need to know how to fail well. Admit failures to others. Don’t make them into taboo topics. Otherwise, you’ll never learn from them. They’ll just weigh you down with bitterness and regret.
4. Don’t let debt force you to make a profit before you make a difference.
“… You cannot serve both God and Money.” –Matthew 6:24
Many of us get stuck in patterns we don’t like because we’ve let our worry over money speak louder than our dreams. This is a resistance trying to keep us complacent. We battle it by prioritizing the needs of people before our desire for financial freedom. Because we need money but also want to make a difference, we try harder for meaningful work; we don’t simply surrender to work that does nothing for the world and ourselves.
Work hard to give back to people, don’t work hard to give to yourself.
5. Pray for character-growth.
Ever been told not to pray for patience (or anything else of that sort) because God will then give you situations to practice it? Sadly, many of us listen to this. We don’t like being tested and refined the hard way, so we don’t pray for it. But this is exactly what we need to be better people in the world. We need to first have the character to make a difference before we can actually make a difference. And the best way to do this is to pray for character-growth. Let’s not avoid it because it’s hard.
6. Dream big, start small.
“Whoever can be trusted with very little can also be trusted with much . . .” –Luke 16:10
Many of us want to do bold, ferocious things to make a difference in the world. But Jesus tells us that we can’t do this without first being faithful in the small.
We can’t bypass the small things God asks for us to steward.
We can dream big, but know that the only way to reach those dreams is to be faithful in the small steps you take toward them. Taking small steps now will prepare us to take larger strides and leaps further on down the road.
7. Give up the arrogance of thinking you are the solution.
Ever think you can “do church better” or “you can change where others have gone wrong?” Well, hate to break it to you, but you might be thinking too highly of yourself. God does not call you to be the savior who redeems situations once and for all. This is the collective work of the church, not an individual.
We would do better shedding our pride and working with others rather than trying to save them on our own.
8. Life is not a linear, step-by-step formula for success. Take steps outside the norm.
We can unknowingly embrace the conventional formula for life and nothing more, the formula that says, “school, work, family, retire, die.” But the beautiful thing about Jesus coming, dying, and rising again is that He imbues meaning in this formula. He says we are more and we are capable of more. You can step aside from a job to go to another country and be a missionary. You can forego having a family in order to serve in another capacity. You can live with little to no money. All of this because Jesus gives us meaning, lets us know how life is better lived following Him rather than our conventions.
Knowing this has radically changed my life. It helps me reach for bold endeavors, and not be afraid to take sidesteps. If Jesus hadn’t come, I wouldn’t have had a guiding set of values for life—which means, I would’ve had to follow the formula to stay sane about life. I could have found no meaning outside of it.
But because of Jesus, we all have the freedom to be creative with our lives—just as long as we are faithful to Him in the process.
Want more JesusHacks for your twenties? Check out my friend Paul Angone’s new book, All Groan Up, for excellent insights on how to survive this time.
If you liked this post, check out:
4 Things Complicating the Life of Every Twentysomething