Life So Far: A Very Short Biography
Why not reduce the critical events of your life to their foundations? It isn’t so much what the events were as it is why they came about in the first place. We all need a biography of worldview since our choices in life will probably continue on the same path as they always have unless there are major shifts in the foundation.
Here, then, with some apologies, is the biographical progression of my foundations.
You’re not good enough. The impact of this foundation on my life has been enormous. It made me into the driver, Type A, overachiever. It also contributed to my spectacular failures. If you really believe that you are not good enough, then no matter what you achieve it will never be quite enough. With time, constant defeat moves people with not good enough thinking into skepticism, amorality and apathy.
What matters most is me. When you can’t please others over an extended period of time, energy shifts its focus. Becoming the center of my own universe might not have been moral, but at least it seemed possible. Of course, God built the world so that this foundation is both logically and socially unworkable, but it sometimes takes a great deal of difficult experience to discover that what God says is really true.
Life will never be all that you want. When you can no longer please yourself, life takes a decided turn toward the dark side. If life will never give you all that you want, then you might as well take what it will give you now. Remember the song, “love the one you’re with”. This is the basis of most modern ethical thinking. I can’t have what I really want so I will take what I can get.
Security is more important than purpose. The great lie, masked with the power of affluence. Collect enough and the sheer volume will overcome inner emptiness. Or at least allow you to live in denial. Sooner or later (usually later) we learn how hopeless we really were.
If you’re going to change direction, somewhere in here you will need to be re-generated (what evangelicals call “born again” – a term that doesn’t do justice to Peter’s word).
God’s perspective is the only perspective. The reason it’s so difficult to come to terms with this at the beginning is that God doesn’t insist on my taking His point of view and I think I know better. God’s perspective is not comfortable, not socially acceptable and certainly not passive. I better have a good handle on my value to God before I run down this road because I am going to encounter plenty of people, inside and outside of the church, who will tell me to conform to their image. This is the beginning of a long obedience in the same direction (Eugene Peterson) based on ruthless trust (Bernard Manning). It HURTS! It can be lonely, frightening, difficult, discouraging and confusing. But what did you expect? Learning to unlearn all the years you spent programming yourself for destruction is not an easy task. Fortunately, God knows it’s not easy.
One eternity at a time. Life takes on a different timeframe when I set the goals of my efforts on the other side of the human horizon. I have been seduced to believe that success is measured in terms of accomplishment. Now I have to learn that accomplishment has nothing to do with divine relationship and only relationship births success.
So far, my life has been a divine recovery process. God is refining years of waste into a few moments of delight. I am hopeful that the “delight” side of the equation will grow. I’ve contributed about all I can to the waste side.
