Where is life found?
In America, important topics like life and death and meaning and purpose are hard to talk about. Everyone has his or her own viewpoint and we try to respect that. But sometimes we differ and we don’t like to offend our friends. So I offer this little essay to my friends to hear a bit of my personal journey of discovery where it can be read in quietness and thought. I hope you will simply hear it as the discovery of a friend and consider what I say. Some things are too important to keep to ourselves.
A few years ago I heard a man talk about his “little red rubber ball.” He was creating a metaphor for searching and finding meaning in the little red ball he had chased as a boy on a playground. That ball had pointed to his athletic ability, and to what was most important to him. The metaphor is powerful because it says we should follow our dreams, the things that really make us come alive, wherever they take us. In his words, “Once you find it, you must follow it, and that takes courage, strength, and imagination”
Much of my life I have tried to pursue life by how well I got through a day or how much I enjoyed what I was doing in my life, by the use of my wits and my ability to explain hard things in a simple way. But I have come to the place where I know this is fruitless and has not satisfied who I find myself to be in a deep way. I have come to see that things or vocation or time or even pleasures cannot be my little red rubber ball, nor anything that is only of temporary existence. I know I am made for more than that. These things just do not fulfill. What if maybe all this is looking for and at “life” in a fundamentally wrong way? What if life cannot be found in day to day existence, and really isn’t about making it through another day, or having our heart beat for another year, or even in finding out what we do best or are really skilled at? Maybe life really isn’t just our biological existence, and the ways we make that tolerable or interesting. So where then do we find a life that is actually life?
If the universe is fundamentally impersonal, then why should we expect life to be found anywhere at all? I don’t think, in the case of a cold and empty universe where all there is is physical matter, that life can be found. How could it be? My “life” would just be existence for a mere 70 to 80 years and then back to dust. No matter how interesting or eventful my existence was, that would be the fundamental thing. Life would be simply prolonged death, and there is no meaning. But what if? What if the universe is fundamentally personal? What if a personal but infinitely powerful being made this universe and calls us into personal fellowship or friendship with himself as the fundamental thing life is? Then that would mean that all the searching for purpose and meaning and “life” in the impersonal, in things or existence or physical pleasure, whatever I can do and muster up, was searching in all the wrong places. These things I have known, and I have believed that knowing my creator was very important. But the new idea, is that He Himself is life.
The right to place to search would be in the realm of the personal, the realm of the creator who is personal. This is what I now believe life is. It is not existence biologically, no matter how interesting or extravagant that existence is. It is friendship with the one who is the personal core or center of this universe: its creator. Many years ago I was approached by this creator to start a friendship, but it has taken many years for me to realize that He did not want to make my “life” better or easier or more satisfying. He wanted to become my life itself.
Now for some of you, you may not agree with me when I say that Jesus is the answer to this question (and I am going to talk about him some more in this). But I have found that He is. I didn’t believe that growing up, and even for many years as his follower, I didn’t get that he himself is life. So if that is where you are at, I would encourage you to read the New testament for starters (start with the book of John) to check out who Jesus is and what he has said and done.
Jesus Christ said that eternal life is to know this one true God, and himself, who had been sent by God. Life is found in the personal creator God. Jesus also said that if we heard his words and believed the one who had sent Him, we had crossed over from death to life. Fundamentally we are dead apart from knowing Him. But we are also alive when we hear him and begin to believe him and to have a friendship with him.
I am not saying that life is anything about becoming religious, joining a church or synagogue, giving money to poor people, or becoming a good person. Those won’t make dead people come alive. But the person who holds the power of life and death can. And He wants to. And he says that life is in knowing him. Jesus said He had come to give us life, and to the full. And he gives it through Himself.
Jesus gave himself for us in this world and he took away the cause of our alienation from his Father, the guilt of our evil that is a very part of our natural selves. Not guilt feelings, but actual guilt because of wrong choices and actions and motives. We see this spring up often, in the lies we tell to protect ourselves and in the desires we have to advance at others’ expense. We see it in the self centered nature of our existence where we primarily protect our own existence and in the lack of concern we have over our creator’s desire to be loved by us. It permeates us. So does a specialness, no doubt. We have a sense that we are special and valuable and worthy. But that does not negate the fact that we have fallen short in many ways of what we know we should be. We can pretend we are fundamentally good, but we know better when we are alone and realize we don’t have friendship with our creator just because we might wish to. And so, as the basic biblical message says that we come to God on the basis of the death and resurrection of Jesus in history, it is because his sacrifice of His life is the real sacrifice that makes us friends with God in light of the wrong we have done. This sacrifice took away our guilt. Again, this is our true guilt because of evil, not just guilt feelings. Jesus did this so we could know Him and find life in Him. “He died for us, so that…we might live together with him.” He also was raised from the dead, and therefore we can know him now.
Again, I am not saying that being someone who knows Jesus is about being a good person or a church person or someone who helps the poor, although at least some of Jesus’ followers these days do things like that. Someone who knows Jesus is to be someone who is finding life in him. We start by stopping our effort at giving ourselves life, and instead let Him give us life by what he did for us in His death and resurrection from the dead. And then we can begin to know and love him, to become his friend. And life is forever found in knowing him more and more.
Back to the metaphor of the red rubber ball. Someone put that red rubber ball on the playground for that little boy to find. So, I don’t need a red rubber ball, what I need is the one who put the red rubber ball on the playground. I need the person, not the impersonal thing or passion or vocation or work he has given me that seems to satisfy for a while. And once I begin to know him, I can be content. And then he may just give me a rubber ball to express much of my love and friendship for him in a way that suits me best. But that keeps the red rubber ball (or is it golden, or another color?) in the right place.
Thoughts from your friend,
Kevin.
