During my late tens, my twenties, and my early thirties, I thought myself to be a reasonably good person. I knew that I wasn’t a saint, but I could rattle off the names of a dozen Hitleresque persons worse than I. Then I became a man and (mostly) gave up childish ways. Faced with a nagging desire to know the true Truth, I realized that I was not really all that good. Not nearly.
I got married, bought our first home, climbed the career ladder, and made good money. I allowed the last two items of the preceding list to become my raisons d’etre—my reasons for being. Big mistake. As a then nominal Christian, I stumbled into a wiry, Reformed Baptist preacher who gob smacked me with the possibility of actually wasting one’s life. The concept left me stunned to my shoes. He disillusioned me of the idea of buying a boat, retiring to Punta Gorda, Florida, playing softball and collecting seashells.
I listened to dozens of his sermons while pedaling my stationary bike. I started to become annoyed with his insistence that “life” as I knew it was not life at all, that what we often mistake for life is rather a system of unimportant diversions.
Note that I wrote “unimportant,” not “inconsequential.” A lot of unimportant things have consequences. Passive decisions can have monumental and eternal consequences. Without warning, life can become a system of passive decisions. The American dream is such a system of passive decisions. Almost without the slightest thought, we may embrace the idea that life consists of building a career, making a home, buying stuff, and chasing postcard vacations, like going to Punta Gorda.
There is nothing wrong with the American Dream if it does not become the primary objective of one’s life. Food is good, gluttony is not. Money has a function, but it is a false objective. Vacations are restorative, but they are an escape. In fact, everything about the American Dream is an escape made up of unimportant (but consequential) diversions. Realize it or not, the American Dream is the scenery that flies by as you ride the rails to your final destination.
The sermons I Youtubed while working out became the existential icing on the materializing realization that it is difficult to discover the meaning of “good” while living a life of unimportant diversions. The American Dream can leave us confused about the main point of our lives and wholly unprepared for what comes after.
I am now in my seventh decade and I am again stunned to my shoes when I consider how close I came to wasting my life. If not for the love of a relentless God and the people he purposely sprinkled into my life, I would have persisted in the haze that I was a reasonably good person pursuing my slice of the American Dream. I am now able to look back on decades of self-delusion and see clearly the sins for which I now fall weeping at the feet of Jesus. My eyes have been opened to how close I have come to riding the remainder of my life until it flew off the rails and tumbled into the pit of perfected irrelevance and unspeakable aguish.
What we call “life” is a prelude, a dress rehearsal if you will, for eternity. We pass through a deluge of unimportant diversions. Some of us are swept away by the current while others find solid footing in a loving God. In the process, we discover that the American Dream has the potential to become a final, eternal nightmare. We also discover that while we are capable of conceiving of “my truth” and “your truth,” that there is in the end only one Truth. While we can also convince ourselves that we are reasonably good, there is really only one good—God. When our goodness is measured against His goodness, there is no discernable difference between us and the meanest, most horrible person we can imagine.
In the end or nearing the end, I once again see how I have been rescued by a relentless God. Rather than see my retirement as the opportunity to enjoy life and to find recreation with fewer concerns or responsibilities or to chase after postcards and collecting shells in Punta Gorda, my age is a vantage point from which I can squint eternity as the American Dream and my puny concepts of “truth” and “good” fade into vapors. It is only in God through His son Jesus Christ where we finally find the real good, the real truth, and that which is consummately more real than any dream.
Don’t waste (the rest of) your life.
