The Attitude That’s Been Forming for Thirty Years
I reconnected recently with an old friend who is a pastor — a man who has shaped me over decades in ways I’m still accounting for, from the way he rebuilds an engine to the way he conducts his life. When a man like that takes a position, you either nod or you push back hard. He said love is an action. I said love is an attitude.
After the call, I did some digging. Whenever Bob challenges me, I know there’s something to learn. It’s taken me thirty years to find the word for what has been happening underneath. That word is phronéō.
The Argument
My friend is not wrong. James says faith without works is dead. The whole prophetic tradition says show me your love — don’t describe it, demonstrate it. The parable of the Good Samaritan ends not with a feeling but with a bill paid and a wound dressed. AA taught me early: you act your way into right living, not think your way. When I didn’t feel like doing the next right thing, I did it anyway. For thirty years. That matters.
But I’m not wrong either. Paul spends half of his letters warning against the failure mode of action disconnected from interior transformation. The Pharisees are his exhibit A — maximum religion, minimum change. They performed love. They tithed and fasted and prayed in public. And Jesus said they were whitewashed tombs. The actions were real. The root was rotten.
AA knows this too, which is why the Big Book says the essentials are willingness, honesty, and open-mindedness. Not actions — attitudes. Without them, you don’t get recovery. You get white-knuckling. A dry drunk is a Pharisee in different clothing.
So which is it — action or attitude?
Both. And they’re not in tension. They’re guarding against opposite failure modes.
Paul guards against earning your way. James guards against believing your way without it costing anything. Between them, they’re describing the same circuit entered at different points. The circuit goes like this:
Faith → Identity → Attitude → Action
And when the interior stalls, right action can prime the pump back toward the interior. It runs both directions. What it cannot do is skip the root entirely and survive.
The Headwaters
Where does the circuit start?
As we continued our conversation I pointed him to Philippians 2:5. Have this attitude in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus. He pushed back with “love is action.” I pushed back harder, because I knew something was in that verse.
The Greek word Paul uses is phronéō. It is not the word for intellect (nous), and it is not the word for emotion (kardia). Phronéō is the whole-person orientation. The settled posture of the self toward everything. The direction you face before you think or feel or act. It is closer to who you are than to what you do.
Paul saturates the letter to the Philippians with this word. Which makes sense — Philippians is the joy letter, the peace letter, written from prison. Paul has landed somewhere internally that circumstances cannot reach. He is not performing contentment. He has been formed into it. That is phronéō at work.
The attitude of Christ that Paul is pointing to is kenosis — self-emptying, turning outward, releasing the grip on self-protection and status. Which is the exact opposite of what fear produces. Fear curves us inward. Phronéō — the mind of Christ — turns us outward. Not through willpower, but through formation. Through a slow reorganization of the will at the deepest level.
And where does that formation begin?
It begins with identity.
Believe and you are saved. That is not just a transaction at the front of the church. It is the starting condition for everything else. Because phronéō cannot be manufactured out of nothing. You can only empty yourself if you know who you are. You can only give from a settled identity.
And that identity is not something you construct or earn. It is given. [I have written about what that identity looks like — what God actually says about who you are.] The short version is this: loved before you performed. Accepted before you proved anything. Amazing grace.
Accept that you are accepted. Paul Tillich said it, Brennan Manning carried it, and people like me needed it put that plainly — because we have spent decades not believing it in our bones even when we believed it in our heads. That gap — between intellectual assent and embodied trust — is the distance the work has to travel. It is the work of a lifetime. It is the work of faith.
The Attitude Problem
I have been told most of my life that I have an attitude problem.
They were right. But the problem wasn’t the strength of my attitudes — it was what they were built on. A wounded ego. Fear, shame, survival, a self curved inward by a childhood that required it. Fear → Control → Perfectionism → Shame. That was not a character flaw. It was wiring.
But here is what I have come to understand as the real attitude problem — the one underneath the one people could see. It is this: I am 100% broken and 100% beloved. Both. Simultaneously. And the work, the lifelong work, is holding both as true without letting one cancel the other.
The broken part is easy to believe. It has evidence. A lifetime of it. The beloved part requires faith — the willingness to accept what God says about me over what my history, my wounds, and my shame have been saying for decades.
That tension — that is where phronéō lives. The settled posture of a self that has stopped arguing with God about its own worth.
For most of my sobriety I have prayed the same prayer: I ask for the willingness to be willing. Not “give me the strength to do the right thing.” Earlier than that. I can’t even get to wanting what you want — help me want to want it. It is an exercise of humility — the deliberate posture of a self that knows it cannot generate what it needs from the inside. Grace has to go that deep because the distortion goes that deep.
Something has been forming underneath all of it. After thirty years of right action in spite of my feelings, I am finding an underlying faith — a belief, a motivation, an identity — from which the actions are beginning to flow differently. Less forced. Less white-knuckled. More like fruit from a root than performance from a script.
That is phronéō. Growing, developing, forming — sometimes obscured, sometimes suppressed — but there, underneath, all along.
The Ceiling
Years ago I spent time with Kenton Beshore, a Senior Pastor of a large church in Orange County. We rode dirt bikes together. Over lunch one day I was telling him about my involvement in AA, what it had done for me, how it was doing things in me I couldn’t explain. He listened, and then he said something that landed strangely and stayed with me:
“AA is good, but there’s better.”
I didn’t fully understand it then. I do now.
AA gave me the structure of transformation. The surrender, the inventory, the amends, the sponsorship, the community, the practice of service. It works. Thirty years is the evidence. But AA’s Higher Power is deliberately unnamed. That is its genius for opening the door to everyone, and also its ceiling.
AA can reorganize behavior. It can even reorganize the will to a point. What it cannot give you is a named identity. You are my beloved. I have called you by name. You are accepted. You can’t be formed into the mind of an unnamed higher power. You can only be formed into the mind of someone you know. Someone who knows you. That is the specifically Christian claim — a named God, a specific person, a particular face — and it changes the equation for phronéō entirely.
What I have actually lived is both. Thirty years of AA gave me practiced actions and accountability and community. And underneath that, faith in a named God has been doing the deeper work — the identity formation, the slow displacement of shame, the phronéō taking root in soil that was being prepared all along.
Kenton saw the ceiling from the outside. I found what is above it from the inside.
The Word I Was Looking For
Bob said love is an action. I said love is an attitude. We were both right.
But here is the fuller picture as I understand it now:
Faith establishes your identity at the root. Not a one-time decision — a continuous orientation of trust that is slowly reshaping what you want, what you fear, what you reach for. From that identity flows interior transformation — the attitude, the phronéō, the settled posture of a self that has learned to hold its own brokenness and belovedness at the same time. From that attitude flows action that is no longer performance, no longer compliance, but expression. Evidence of something real underneath.
The Pharisee breaks the circuit by disconnecting action from interior entirely. The white-knuckler breaks it by grinding the action without the roots going deep. The sentimentalist breaks it by stopping at beautiful belief that never touches the ground.
The way through is what I have been stumbling toward my whole life:
Believe you are loved. Let that go deep — all the way down into the broken places. From that ground, be formed. From that formation, love — as attitude, and then as action, and then as the thing other people call character.
Phronéō. The attitude of Christ.
That is what has been forming in me for thirty years. I am just now learning the word for what has been happening underneath.