Life Fully Lived

My wife and I had one of our bi-monthly conversations about "life issues" the other day. As usual when this happens, we were discussing our future plans. You can never be sure in marriage, but I believe we can away with a sense of mutual agreement (I guess agreement is always mutual, huh?) and shared expectations. We'll see, though . . .

As we're both more conscious now--partly due to the clarity that is the invariable result of working through difficult times in life--that a life that is not fully lived is hardly worth living, we're in the process of trying to understand what fully lived means for us. I tend to agree with a friend of mine that the Christian life is as much about life now as it is about the afterlife. By saying this I do not mean to suggest either that heaven will be as ho hum as this world seems at times or that it's not something to yearn for; rather, I'm simply suggesting what is a fairly ordinary concept: the eternal kind of life is a life that is lived in an eternal kind of way right now. Jesus certainly didn't spend his life teaching his disciples and those who would listen about what the Kingdom of God was all about simply so they would be prepared for it when they died. No, armed with this radical personal revelation of what it means to live in God's presence, they were to begin living before him right then and there.

Heaven will certainly be the consumation that will make life as we know it now dim in comparison, but we are not to wait until then to live a heavenly type life. In as sense, our realm here is a sort of testing ground, one that transforms us as much as teaches us. This is why the author of 1 Peter tells a group of persecuted Christians that they are to "rejoice, " though they are suffering hardships , since "the tested genuiness of your faith . . . may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ." But while the focus sometimes is put on the future revelation, important emphasis must be given to 1) rejoicing now and 2) faith being tested and made genuine now. The salvation that is the outcome of the tested faith, moreover, forms the basis for the author's instructions on how to live in this present time.

All this is to state the obvious: that God cares how we live now as his disciples. Back to my conversation with my wife. We realized that coming to turns with the need to live life fully involves a lot of considerations. Leaving aside the particulars for now, such as what exactly we will do, it involves at least two key steps: 1) having clear expectations, that is, realizing that hardships very likely will be a reality; and 2) trusting God when hardships arrive.

These seem like simple and straightforward concepts, but for us they are not. We have to steer clear of the rosy pictures that we often paint of our future, on the one hand, and on the other avoid the trap of fixating on the worst possible scenarios, which tends to cause obsessive worry. Of course, we, being who we are, tend to be chronic worriers. Only problem is that I also am a hopeless dreamer. You see the problem. Adding to my consternation is an overactive instrospection; a pensiveness run awry. I don't trust my insticts as they're always corrupted. This means that I can't confidently lead my wife down any path, especially one that involves possible danger and deprivation, since I'm likely only pursuing a phantom that is the product of misdirected impulses to please God through stamping my name on the pages of history. Perhaps I'm a Christian megalomanic. Well, there's the diagnosis: paralysis by introspection. Prognosis: not good. Outlook: twenty to thirty years of desk jobs. Ugh.

Despite my reversions to a pessimistic outlook--see the last paragraph--our discussion was positive and has spawned (I love that word), what I want to call in advance, productive reflection. Growing in the kind of Christ-conscious, Kingdom of God, life-lived-now that I've been ruminating on means, I believe, not only making ourselves available for the Lord's transformative work here on Earth but also being cognizant of God's using us while he's doing it. Other people are much better at achieving this recognition than I am, but I want to do better, because it's honoring to God when I acknowledge his ability to use me in whatever situation I'm facing at the moment, regardless of my weaknesses. It's not about me, it's about him. I'm tired of only being able to see how God has used me and me/my wife in retrospect; I want to see him working now.