The Loss of Will

HR McMasters often speaks of breaking the enemy’s will to fight. Your enemy may have the resources to fight, but if your enemy lacks the will to fight then victory is nigh guaranteed. The Ukrainian resistance to the Russian invasion is a dramatic testament to the power of will. Regardless of your opinions of that conflict, it is true to state that the Russians miscalculated (and vastly underestimated) the Ukrainian will to resist them.

The will is a neglected aspect of humanity, perhaps because it isn’t easy to address. Even defining the will is a bit more difficult than differentiating between the intellect and the emotions, or the affections and the behavior. Human beings think, feel, desire, and do. But without a consideration for this thing called “will”, we are missing something.

We have a will (or we will) because God has a will (or alternately, God wills).

1Th 5:18  In every thing give thanks: for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus concerning you. 

2Pe 3:9  The Lord is not slack concerning his promise, as some men count slackness; but is longsuffering to us-ward, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance.

The will is the harnessing of God’s desire, wisdom, and power into a force. It is volition. When God wills, it means all of this: He desires something, His wisdom informs not only His desire but His method of achieving that desire, and His power is brought to bear such that what He wills comes to pass. If this definition is correct, God can desire something that He does not will, but He cannot will something that He does not desire.

Without a will, desire is never translated into action. You may want to get up, but until you force your body to actually throw the covers off and plant your feet on the ground, then you will stay in bed. To want may be present within you, but to will is just as important. The loss of will is spoken of in various places in the Bible. For example, in 1 Thessalonians 5:14, we are told to “comfort the feeble-minded”. The Greek oligopsuchos literally means something like small-souled or little spirited, so it is sometimes translated “faint-hearted”. It is also used in the Septuagint to translate Exodus 6:9 (rendered anguish of spirit in the KJV). The enslaved Jewish people had no will left.

I think the will is the place where desire, affection, and intellect meet force (or motion or volition). And while the will can be idolized (and is so wonderfully captured in CS Lewis’ That Hideous Strength), the loss of will is just as devastating as the loss of intellect or affection. But we have some notion of how to restore the mental and the emotional. Or at least we talk about it. But I don’t know that I have ever had a really good conversation about the causes of lost will or the restoration of a lackluster will. So I’m going to take a stab at describing one reason for a weakened will and the path to restoration.

Personally, I have experienced a loss of will (or willpower) as a result of a diluted focus. In these middle years of life, responsibilities abound. These responsibilities each require intellectual and emotional bandwidth, some more-so than others. Since will is the point at which the intellect/affections intersect with force, the will becomes divided as it strives to move me in a specific direction. I sometimes find myself frozen, knowing that a course of action needs to be taken, and also knowing that any action would suffice. Nevertheless, the action doesn’t materialize because there is no will to move me.

The restoration of will involves a clarity and focus of purpose. It is hard to be successful or resilient or creatively aggressive when attention is being absorbed across too wide a field of vision. Like water pressure, will increases when it is forced into a narrower flow. Now human beings are odd ducks, so it would be easy to go wrong here. There are activities that are restorative in nature, even though they broaden the field of vision. For example, I enjoy writing, and it energizes me. But when it comes to responsibilities, too many of them become the case of “death by a thousand cuts”.

When your will-power is depleted, one way that I have found to restore it is to restrict it. If you feel stuck and unable to move yourself purposefully in any one direction, it may be because you are trying to move in too many different directions at the same time. Choose one, even if it means putting other things on the back burner for a season.