I’ve taken up some space on this here blizog writing about ideas that are fairly new to me. It’s been great to work out kinks in my thinking and theology through writing. It’s also been unexpected. When I got back into writing, I didn’t foresee being able to better understand my own thoughts by writing them out. Something about realizing that another sentient being is going to read this and that it needs to be intelligible really helps me narrow and focus.
That being said, I thought it was time to write about something that I’ve actually thought about more than once or twice. I was visiting a fellow Moscowvite’s blog archives where I found this writer saying she’d once heard something to the effect of our lives here on Earth being practice for heaven. I thought to myself, “Hm. I say that a lot. She may have even heard it from me, I say it so much. I should elaborate on that.”
What first sparked this idea in me was writing a paper a few semesters ago on Francis Schaeffer’s “Pollution and the Death of Man: The Christian View of Ecology.” While I didn’t actually get much from the book, I did start to form this idea of being given little things to watch over in order to prove yourself responsible.
I think the most obvious example of this in Scripture comes from Mark, where Christ says: “He who is faithful in a very little thing is faithful also in much; and he who is unrighteous in a very little thing is unrighteous also in much. If therefore you have not been faithful in the use of unrighteous mammon, who will entrust the true riches to you?”
My first thought in response to this was along the lines of “Oh. If we treat something temporal, like the environment, with contempt and laziness, why should we be trusted with eternal things in the next life?” I was basically seeing our life here as a proving ground for “the real thing.”
But as I thought more about it, I started to see smaller levels of the same principle in our lives here and now. Look at childhood for example: Does it really matter how well you score on your 4th grade math test? Will nations fall and souls perish if you don’t carry the remainder? No. But the common misconception among youth is the idea that “Oh this isn’t important. When things get important, then I’ll be responsible.” Right. After years of practicing sloth, misuse, and neglect, you’ll be able to “be responsible.”
Doug Wilson said in one of his sermons that there are no big choices, since all the little choices we’ve made up to the point of this big one brought us there. I agree with that, but there’s also something to be said for there not being any small choices. Or at least there’s never an excuse for making a choice flippantly, since even if it’s whether you’ll have chocolate or vanilla ice cream for dessert, you form habits of decision making all the time. Thankfully, we’re given more important things to deal with than dessert choices and don’t have to try and impart great importance to things that just aren’t important. We have to choose where we go to college, if we’ll watch that movie, who we’ll marry, how we’ll return good for evil. These are important decisions, that we’ve hopefully practiced for in the years leading up to them.
An example that I’m sure we’ve all heard, but fits here, is a single guy’s preparation for marriage. What does the world tell you about this? Live it up, this is your time, soon enough you’ll be enslaved to The Wife. This is the time to be an idiot.
While I agree that there are aspects of the single life that we should take advantage of, it’s not an excuse to be glib with the choices we make. Not being attached to and responsible for a family does free you up in a certain sense. I think that the misconception, at least that I’ve held for a while, is that we’re freer in every sense until marriage. That “I do” translates to “I do put away any and all of my previous desires, freedoms, and enjoyments.”
I have a great time explaining this idea to kids at camp, how being a meathead now means stacking the deck against yourself in the future. Thankfully I have all kinds of examples from my own life to back this up. I’m constantly amazed at how God weaves our own folly and rebelliousness back into things that are ultimately good.
I don’t see the benefits of preparation for more important matters starting at death. Rather, we’ve given opportunities all throughout our life to practice for things of greater and greater consequence. At death, I hope that I’ve shown myself responsible enough to take on even weightier matters.
3 comments:
Thank you for posting this. It's right on. I often marvel when I know I've done something right or made a good decision. Then I realize it's the product of making good little decisions (it's the little foxes that spoil the vineyard, afterall). It's also a product of good, Christian parenting and discipline. Your insight about what the single life "should" be before tying one's self down is right on. It's equally difficult to remember sometimes that my actions as a married woman, however small, mean something. Three months into my marriage it hit me that no one was going to hold my hand through making our relationship healthy, and I couldn't just breeze through. Every little decision I make affects my husband, and that's something I'm still trying very hard to learn.
I've thought about this a lot as well (maybe said it too much too) though maybe not so blatently "What We Do = practice for Something Else." It has always seemed, though, that given the inherant laws of the universe the outcome of everything we do is a reflection of, probably, something else. Not really in a platonic sense, just in the obvious fire-burns-you sense. Grace is part of this equation because God wrote the world that way, as a day to our night, as wind to our sails...
MDaddy,
You are getting pretty good at this here blogging. I appreciated this so much, I read it twice, and I'm going to tell my girlfriend to read it. Bravo.
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