Life as an experiment.

(Vagabond Discipleship, Part 5)

Times come and times go. Life keeps changing. Life always changes. And even though it's hard, it's a sign of something good. I think of what my life would look like if it didn't change, if I resigned myself as an 18 year old to cowardice, hid myself in my parents' basement, and played video games. It would have been a very easy life, assuming mom and dad would have ever gone along with it. None of the pain that comes along with growth would have ever affected me. The photographs that make me long for people and places in my memory would either not have been taken or simply not meant anything.

Outreach is over. Six weeks of endlessly wandering all over this lovely country have taken their toll,
and it's a relief to be back in Bangkok. The final two weeks, which I didn't get much of a chance to blog about, were life-filled ones. I don't mean that as a neat feel-goody sentiment, I mean it in the real sense. Exhaustion, heartache, and staggering beauty, all in the context of burmese migrant slums, public hospitals, minimum security prisons, buddhist and christian schools, improperly equipped internet cafes, the homes of friendly strangers, and the streets and highways of this beautiful land.

I'm sitting on the lovely, rock hard matress on the second bottom bunk of the men's quarters. I used to complain about this matress, how hard it is and how when I was getting used to it I would toss in bed endlessly before I could sleep. I don't complain about it anymore. I love it. It's not that it's any more comfortable than before, it's just that I've grown. I see something more in this mattress now: I see the memories in it. I think of the countless times over the past many months when I would come in, expecting to take my rightful claim to the 15 square feet of space on this continent that I have any jurisdiction over, only for it to be filled with four kids from three continents watching youtube videos.

These were two seasons. Lecture phase, and outreach. Before that was a season of mental wandering in the midwest, and before that were the many seasons of my time at Truman State. I have mental images of the next three seasons, of my time serving in thailand, of the six months in America, and then moving to Sweden and studying the bible for nine months. And the thing about all of these seasons is that while I could make meaningless bullet points about the differences and similarities of each, as I continue to move through them I've begun to notice something. Growth. Time seems to stack itself onto the past like bricks in a building or rings in a tree. Sometimes we don't notice the details, but the growth is there; if you pay close enough attention, you'll see it.


Since the seasons of life seem to break off, to have that line of clear difference that distinguishes between the two times, it's easy to think of them as almost unrelated, but the past informs the present like the foundations of a building keep the roof stable. Even the seasons that didn't go the way you planned are important as long as you take the lessons and learn from them. This is what our lives on this earth are: messy experiments. In living, we learn how to live. If we're good about it, we learn what it means to live well, to find meaning in it. To find meaning in it all, everything that we experience - some great and hidden truth that's eluded us that finds us in the midst of the chaos. Life can be messy and gross and painful and often in the short term it doesn't go the way you might hope, and sometimes you learn that the things you had put hope in weren't ever the things that could give you peace and fulfillment. Recognition, security, material possession, affirmation among peers - To center one's identity around these things has always meant to buy into a lie. One day, our bodies will perish and succumb to decay and none of these things will really matter, which is to mean that they never mattered, not even when it felt like they did. My conclusion about that while I'm still young is that I get one life, and I'm not going to waste it pursuing those false gods.

So what should we pursue with our lives? The campy sunday-school-answer way of putting it is to follow God. This seems too simple, though, so perhaps I'll phrase it this way: If to follow those meaningless things that we've been taught are important is like bowing before a false god, then what we need to do is find the true God and spend our lives pursuing whoever or whatever that true God might be. In this sense I'm not referring to God so much as a sentient being (although I believe he is), I'm referring to "God" as a metaphorical representation of "the meaning of life." Every person seems to have their own ideas of what that means, and while we can gleam insight from their understanding (or misunderstandings), ultimately the only way we can develop our own understanding is to do it ourselves: to experiment. Sometimes this is painful. Sometimes it means to follow gods, realize that they're fake, and to have to come to a moment of painful humility and say, perhaps to ourselves, "The thing I thought was so important was a lie. I'm going to stop spending so much of my short life pursuing that thing." My days of experimenting aren't all behind me, but here are some of the conclusions I've come to so far:

• Life isn't about accomplishing anything, at least not the way I thought. I used to think that it was really important to do big things in life, for the sake of being a notable person who does big things. That's stupid, because it's coming from a perspective of thinking that reputation matters. When you die, the opinion that some people had of you at one point in time simply doesn't matter. It's not a bad thing to have a reputation, though; it's just that it should be a symptom of a life well lived, and not the other way around.
• We should still do those big things. We should do good things, things that are worth doing, as long as they are grounded in proper motives. What are proper motives? Obedience towards the Lord. Love towards other people. That's it. all other motives are evil.
• Life is something to find joy in. Not just pleasure, although that's a part of it. Even in all of the sad and painful things, there's joy, because even the sad things can remind us that we're alive and life is something worth living.
• Life is better when you share it. We humans simply aren't made to be left alone all the time, or to feel forced to hide ourselves in the name of social etiquette and external expectations.
• Television and the internet and what we eat and other sources of pleasure can be good things, but they're nothing to live for or put hope in. We aren't made to merely consume for our own pleasure's sake. We can try, and at some point we'll be miserable for it.
• Our mistakes can either be our downfall or our teacher. If we learn nothing, all is tragedy. if we allow ourselves to grow from our experiences, even our worst mistakes can be what make our lives better.

There are many other things. Perhaps I'll get to them in a follow up post, or a book. This book will be designed especially to fit in among the other books of the "christian living section", not drawing attention to itself but hopefully giving the bookseller the appearance of a well-rounded selection.

Every once in a while I have to remind myself that I'm young and that it's all right that I don't have everything figured out yet. That's what life is for.