Heaven + Earth

Since I don’t have a lot of time right now, and just to get this thing off the ground, I thought I’d start by sharing some ghosts from Christmas past. Here’s something I wrote when I was working a job that I truly hated and life just wasn’t that much fun. Can you relate?

“Have you ever been struck with the notion that we waste the majority of our time doing largely insignificant and unimportant things?  When they get down on their jobs and hectic weekdays, I often like to tell my wife and my friends that real life happens on the weekends.  But add up the number of weekends and holidays we live through over the course of a 35 year career and they barely equal 25 per cent of our total time spent alive.  That means we spend 3/4 of our time every year trudging off to jobs most of us hate, to spend time with people we may not even like, to chase after things we don’t really need.  Granted, many of us are doing this in order to support a family, or a sick parent, or maybe pay off student loans (which are always a good investment).  But even then, are we not at the same time doing it to afford that nice car, that bigger home, that nice set of furniture, that 2nd TV, that restaurant meal, that golf membership, that brand new guitar (can you tell I’m speaking from personal experience here?).  Are we not also doing it to gain that promotion, to gain esteem in the eyes of our peers, to climb the corporate ladder, to make our parents proud, and on and on down an endless list of reasons that compel us to eschew the joy of life for the mundanity of servitude 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, some 250 days a year?

Now I know that not everybody hates their job, and that some jobs are really important, and impact society, and blah blah blah.  I get that, and if you love your job and are doing it because it fulfills you emotionally and spiritually and makes the world a better place, good for you!  You’re in the happy minority.  My point is, it feels like the rest of us have been sold a bill of goods that’s convinced us to give up on our dreams because dreams can’t pay the rent.  Cleverly disguised as “real life”, or the “responsible, mature thing to do”, this bill of goods convinces us that our dreams are really just an illusion, best forgotten once they’ve served their purpose to entertain and distract us.

But isn’t it really the other way around?  Aren’t the things we dream of, the stuff we love to do and the people we love to spend time with what real life is all about?  Aren’t careers, promotions, and the pursuit of material things the real illusion, designed to distract us from the stuff that really matters?  It is an illusion wrought with such accuracy and believability that most of us accept it as reality because we simply grow weary of trying to prove that it’s a deception.  Most of us struggle hard to disprove it when we’re young, when it’s okay to be bold and think that one day your dreams will come true.  As we age, it becomes harder to maintain this struggle because “youthful idealism” gets relabelled as “juvenile naivety” and comments like “when is he going to grow up?”, “time to join the real world”, and “Delinquent Payment - 3rd and Final notice” leave us bruised and battered and believing that the struggle just isn’t worth it anymore.  At 30 years of age, with 2 mortgages and a hefty car payment, believe me when I say I know what I’m talking about.

But just because we grow tired of fighting doesn’t make it okay to surrender.  Jesus said He came that we might have life, and that to the full.  Our dreams and passions are gifts from God who has designed us in His image, and I believe we ignore them at our own peril.  For me, it is even more important at 30 that I seize every opportunity to pursue the dreams I had when I was 20, and it will be even more so at 40, and 50, and so on until I die.  I mean, can I really be happy with a nice house, an expensive car, cool stuff, and a fat bank account if I know I ultimately acquired them as a result of giving up?  No, and I hope you can’t either.  If I’m going to make a difference, and do signficant and important things, I need to remember and embrace the way life is on the weekends, and live everyday as if it were Saturday :-).  If that means I lose the esteem of my parents and peers, so what?  Their priorities are still mixed up in the illusion they believe is real magic instead of base trickery.  If that means I lose my restaurant meals, my car, my house, so what?  The God I believe in, who is never confused about what is real and what is imaginary, has promised to care for me in my obedience to His call, a call that He gave me in the dreams and passions of my youth.”