In which I mash up a song with outlooks on life...and then mash up outlooks on life.
All Around me are familiar faces,
Worn out places,
Worn out faces,
Bright and early for their daily races
Going nowhere,
Going....nowhere
It's nothing really special or extraordinary when someone in their late teens or early twenties has widened the horizons of their mind and has started thinking about life and the world.
I mean, when you get past school, and all your clear set goals (high school, college or whatnot) have been completed, at some point you have to think about how you want to live your life, and how you should be living it.
And you know, I'm not really talking about the career that you may want to have or where you want to live, how much money you would like to earn. Or whether or not you want to get married, what kind of foods you'll eat, the type of ministries you would like to be involved in. Whether or not you will be a morning person or a night owl. No, that's not really what I'm getting at. To me, all that stuff is secondary.
You want to know what comes first?
You've got to know how you are going to get through day to day, in and out, and what your attitude about your daily life is going to be.
Their tears are filling up their glasses
no expression, no expression
Hide my head, I want to drown my sorrow
No tomorrow, no tomorrow
We've got to find out, with Bibles in hand, how we are going to going to get through this life in our minds and souls.
Because I could run around and "do" a million things, fill up my life with work to be done and books to read and people to minister to. I could cram in all sorts of stuff to keep me busy all my life, if I wanted to.
But I could either hate every minute of it, survive every minute of it, or try to enjoy all of it, boring or busy as it may be.
It's like saying that whoever you marry, you could have two views about. You could say it's an
amazing thing that you met the very person that you married, out of all the six billion people in the world, and you got to meet someone as special and unique and as perfect for you, as they are. You could just be thrilled that you get to marry someone like them, because there is no one out their in the world like that, and say
wow thank you Lord I got to marry someone who matches up with my funny quirks and moods, this is so awesome!
Or, you could just kind of say that out of all the billions of people in the world, there are probably several out there who are compatible with you, so when you get married, you just found one of those many people who are compatible enough with you. And you get life done with them because you have to get life done. (FYI, I tend to like the first outlook
a lot better. But I can see myself sliding into the second outlook, too)
I could either be the happy little housewife straight from the fifties, all frilly aprons and baking cookies and dressing up her little babies and hanging her clothes on the line in domestic bliss, budgeting and knitting and "nesting" with a fierce relish . Trust me, some days in life I get in a uncontrollable nesting mood. I bake those cookies with a
vigor and it's glorious.
Or I could just clean the house because it must be done, and take the kids to the park because it's what people do, all the while torn between questions, my life literally seeming to pull at itself, tearing itself apart. For these questions always hang in my mind:
Why does my life matter? How much does this life of mine matter? and because of that, How should I conduct my life? Can I look at it with joy?
I find it kind of funny,
I find it kind of sad,
the dreams in which I'm dying
Are the best I've ever had
If I believe I am saved by God, a God who loved me enough to send His son to die for me, than my life is eternal and precious. What I do, How I spend my time here on earth is thus very important, as I must use this time to further Gods kingdom. Everything I do, every action I take, (or don't take) is drastically important. After all, I am a child of God and it grieves this God when I am doing nothing the the life that He gave me, when I am mediocre, selfish, or lazy. Everything becomes hugely important and I have a high, (and scary) calling to always strive to be holier. Because on that day when I get called home, my deeds in christian life will have been held of great importance, and if my life be a disappointment, I can only equivalent the pain of that remorse and disappointment to the earth exploding inside my chest, fracturing out into an infinity of pieces and hurting all those around me. This is much pressure. This is high calling. This takes otherworldly discipline.
What about this:
I know I am saved by a grace so great that it keeps forgiving me. I see my life as minuscule. After all, if you look at things on a cosmic scale, one significant christian is not much to be considered. To God, a thousand years is like a day. Say I live to be 95. As long a time as that may seem to exist, it is nothing,
nothing....a mere snippet in time. So all the the hundreds of millions of things that I do...lifestyle, my job, my acts of kindness, my sinful acts of selfishness, what I do with my life, how productive it ends up being...well, all of that is just a blink to God. Should I take myself so seriously?
Or perhaps each of these views should be mashed together, and I should find a balance between them all.
Just thinking out loud, folks.
I find it hard to tell you
I find it hard to take
When people run in circles
It's a very very
mad world
mad world
These are excerpts from a song called "Mad World", and while it is not a christian song, it speaks of a very real message of the emptiness of this world we keep running around and doing our daily races in. I love Jasmine Thompsons cover. So haunting and true. I think I've listened this one to death over the past couple weeks.
