The things I have

My elder son, no shrinking violet himself, complained to me that his generation has a drinking problem. He and a few friends went in on a beach house this summer, and he noticed that at the shore the people his age stay drunk from Friday after work until Sunday night. One day he went up to his room only to find a strange girl passed out on his bed and covered with her own vomit.

This got me thinking: I tend to forget how different my life is from the lives of many people I rub shoulders with every day. Just because we drive down the same streets and shop at the same supermarkets, I have assumed that we see the same world. But since God has been in my life, I have things---invisible things---that lots of folks around me don't enjoy. And they make the view from here very different.

I have an identity. For the first half of my life I wondered who or what I was: Was I a bit of protoplasm coughed up from the bowels of the earth? Was I the sum total of a set of physiological drives? Was I the dream of a demigod and would disappear when he woke up? But now I know I am a child of God (1 John 3:1-3). I don't need to get drunk because I'm not an orphan.

I have a purpose. Through the vicissitudes of job changes, the death of a spouse, and a nearly empty nest, I am tethered by the unchanging purpose of bringing glory to God. And in particular, God has left me here so that I may declare the praises of the One who called me out of darkness into his light (1 Peter 2:9). I don't need Jack Daniels to anesthetize purposelessness on the weekends.

I have a sense of meaning. It's strange to think that I inhabit this town with people who think the world began a gazillion years ago out of nothing and will end with a sputter in another gazillion years. The motions we go through every day---filling the gas tank, doing the laundry, dining at the restaurant---are permeated through and through with the sense of what we believe about the solar system. Why not eat, drink, and be merry if you have come from nothing and are proceeding to nothing?

I have rules for living. Nobody likes the idea of "rules" at first. But where there is absolutely no plumb line for telling you if your actions are right or off, there is no freedom but only chaos. The commands of God, as many as are in His Word, actually turn out to be the secret entrances to the pathways of life. When Jesus is our Master, that keeps us from being mastered by our lusts and other people's sins.

I have relationship. I know a few Buddhists and New Age types, and I always feel bad for them because their highest and most ultimate reality is an impersonal force. That is, they are all alone in the universe with no one to talk to when they lay their heads down at night. I lie there and talk to the Living God.

I have a destination. I would do well to remind myself that the people sitting next to me on the train do not know Paradise is the last exit, and that it makes the present bumps on the road bearable. Thomas Hobbes said man's existence is "nasty, brutish, and short." If that's all there is, then as Peggy Lee sang, "let's keep dancin'. Let's break out the booze and have a ball."

Not that anybody seems to be having much fun. Ask my son.

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